David McElroy

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.

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Every time I see suggestions from friends — even bright people who I like — proposing simplistic and ridiculous “solutions” to the current economic crisis, I’m appalled at the level of economic ignorance out there.

We can fix the economy, they say. Just don’t make anybody pay rent for awhile. Banks can let people not pay their loans back for awhile, either. Just put everything on hold. And utilities can keep providing power and Internet service and water and everything else — for free.

See? Just wave a magic wand and decree this. It’s free.

From what I read from such people, it’s clear that they have no understanding of why their proposed magic isn’t possible. And I’ve seen another correlation. People who have to earn enough money to keep their small businesses open are panicking right now, because they know there is no magical Santa Claus who’s going to save them.

But people who’ve never run a business and don’t understand anything beyond getting a paycheck for a job seem to think someone can just wave a magic wand and the economic world can just be on hold for a few months — while they continue to consume resources without paying for them.

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What if the one who got away came back?

Most of us have a love who got away — someone who our feelings turn to in secret moments — someone we still love, who will forever make us quietly ask, “What if…?”

At first, I thought it was just me. Over the last six or eight weeks, I can’t stop my heart from reviewing the past. I can’t stop some internal mechanism from reviewing every old love and giving me revised conclusions.

It’s as though my heart has a brain of its own. It takes all the inputs from the past and then adds the changes going on in the world and renders an updated conclusion about different loves from the past.

Then I realized it isn’t just me. People I know personally are talking with me about making changes to their relationships — ditching something that doesn’t work or reaching out to someone they wish had turned out differently — in ways they wouldn’t have imagined a few months ago.

For some, it’s a time to fix things which have gone wrong or a time to escape relationships which have died or to reach out in vulnerability to love which was lost.

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