A haunting question: ‘Where is love now, out here in the dark?’

By David McElroy · April 21, 2020

There’s no moon out here tonight. It seems almost pitch black — and that feels appropriate.

Because of the street lights and porch lights of my quiet suburban street, the sky looks totally dark from my front porch. I know there are no clouds tonight, though, so the stars have to be there.

The glow of all these dim ambient lights covers up the pinpricks which represent a million burning infernos of light and heat in the distance.

But the light and heat of those stars seem impossibly far away right now. As much as I wish I could feel the heat and see the light, my heart feels the cold distance and knows that it reflects the emptiness of my heart — and the distance between my cold heart and warm love.

I touched real love a little while ago. Just for a moment. It was an accident. But I touched it for a moment — and it was warm and bright and colorful — yet it was just an illusion that I could not hold onto.

But that brief touch has me looking for light and warmth as I sit alone in the darkness after midnight.

My heart needs to know where love is now.

It doesn’t matter what I was looking for. It almost doesn’t matter what I found. It was an email thread between a woman and me. And as soon as I started reading it, I felt as though I was diving into waves and waves of love and understanding.

It felt as though I had been starving for oxygen and the waves of love were filling my lungs and my heart with joy and life.

In that moment, I felt loved. I felt understood. I felt free — as though nothing could ever take that love away from me again.

And then it was gone.

I couldn’t keep reading. It was too painful. It was from a past where all of those things were true and I felt as though all was right with my world.

So I came outside to be alone in the dark. What I had experienced was too bright and powerful. I needed the darkness and the stillness of the night air. And now I’m sitting alone in the quiet, wondering where love is now.

I keep hearing a Sam Phillips song right now. It’s mostly the chorus, where she asks over and over, “Where is love now, out here in the dark?”

It feels more like a stream of consciousness than real words, but I hear the verse:

If I could wait here for you
Without hope or knowing what to do
Watch the light fade away
Without fear or knowing what to say

I don’t even know who “you” is right now. Is it about her? Or is it all about the love which I need from someone else — from some unknowable source? When I ask where love is, I don’t know whether my heart is angrily demanding to know where that woman’s promised love went or if it’s simply pleading for some unknown love instead.

I don’t guess it matters right now. Neither is here. Neither seems possible anymore.

My heart just sits in silence and darkness and mourns the loss of something which ought to be here. I feel as though I should be able to reach out through the millions and millions of miles to one of those stars and pull it down to Earth.

Because love seems that far away.

On a whim, I took a few photos of the empty sky. When I walked into the darkest part of the street — free from any obstruction by trees — I started seeing a few stars. I tried a few manual exposures and got something which is better than I thought I could get, which you see above.

It’s just distant pinpricks of light on the cloudless night sky. But that seems so appropriate. I know what they really are, but they seem so far away that they almost don’t even seem to exist.

That’s the way love feels right now. I know how powerful love is. I know how all-consuming it is. I know how it changes everything.

But it feels so far away that it might as well not exist. And the words from one of the verses from the Sam Phillips song float back into my mind.

And if I can’t see which way to go
I’ll stay lost in silence ’til I know

And that’s where I am. Lost in silence. It’s where I’ve been for years. It’s where I am tonight. And I seem stuck in this lonely silence and darkness. But my heart still needs to know where love is now.

I need to know how to get it back.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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