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Something was happening that I couldn't deny, or wanted to deny. I was falling in love again with still another woman. Two times on the same day! Wow!
I mentally slapped my face. "Peter, don't do that!" I said to myself. But the voice was overruled. "What you are about to do, Peter, cheapens the closeness that you have felt towards Erica, that you have treasured and still do, and probably will treasure forever," argued the voice within.
Oddly, that argument sounded hollow.
"Will a promising new love cheapen anything?" I argued back at myself. "How can one aspect of love, unfolding on top of another, cheapen and dilute anything? Should it not rather enrich both aspects, and this in a manner that the end result is greater than the sum of both parts?" I began to smile to myself that I had won this argument. But had I really won?
I wondered what Erica might have said as a levelheaded scientist, or what the professor might have said in the pub. I reasoned that the professor would likely have ordered a glass of soda water with ice and poured an ounce of Whisky into it. That was his style. "Now taste that!" I heard him say to me in my mind. And I would have tasted it. Then he would have poured another once of Whisky into it. "Now taste it again!" I heard him say. "Has the new addition diluted your first love? Or has loving become more powerful?"
"And what would Erica, the scientist, have said?" I questioned myself.
Ah, that one was easy to answer. "How can love be a poison to itself?" I heard her ask me in return. "How can the restricting of love help us with learning to love more fully, as we all should?" Erica might also have asked, "Does increasing our austerity make the gold more precious, that we may have, or does it merely enhance the poverty?"
I heard her say to me in my mind that we should love more fully in order that we love ourselves more fully, as we should for the wondrous humanity and all its rich dimensions that we all share.
I heard her say to me, "Peter, embrace love at every chance that life presents, by which loving becomes more diffusive, by which the darkness of our days goes away."
I heard Erica in my mind, add as if it were a comment, "I envy you, Peter."
"What do you wish for the most in your life?" Helen broke the silence.
I paused. I hesitated. "I really don't know?" I said finally. "Do I wish for a house, or a better one? No, I don't wish for that. I have one that is perfectly adequate. Do I wish for an interesting job that provides sufficient income? No, I have that too. Do I wish for a loving wife? I have that too. Do I wish for romance? I had that also. I had a beautifully romantic day."
I shook my head. "Isn't that silly of me? You asked me a simple question, what do you want most in life, and I can't answer it. I could say that I wished for sex, but if I did say this, I would have to remind myself that I could have had plenty of that for a twenty-dollar bill or whatever the going price is. So, I really don't know what the answer is to your question."
"There was something that you deeply wanted and couldn't have. That's what brought you to the pub," she said. "Also, I don't think you came there in the middle of the night to learn about politics, or to be scared by it even more that you had been before."
I nodded. "Sure, something was missing, Helen, That wonderfully bright day that I had shared with Erica had ended with a sad failure," I said after a moment of hesitation. "Something didn't happen, that perhaps should have happened. We had the most wonderful day together as two human beings embracing each other in love, but it ended with us facing a barrier. It ended with a line drawn in the sand. In a way I was clad at the time that the line had been drawn. It closed the door to a difficult territory that seemed both beautiful, but also immensely challenging. It seemed easier to avoid the challenge than to deal with it. Isn't that what the whole world is doing? It might also be that the challenge was far greater than anything that either of us was prepared to deal with, so that running away from it was the sanest response?"
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