I
am sure you have all had love poems or notes left in your message
boxes from time to time, canned or original. Unfortunately far more
often the former. Just when you got to the last line and your eyes were
welling up with tears of happiness, imagining your lover laboriously
composing the soul warming verses, only to find the bottom line that
says " something.com " and urges you to click on it, promising endless
supplies of such borrowed sentiment. It conjured up a picture in my
mind the number of " professional lovers " who turn out hundreds of
these love literature each day, then some of them go home in the
evening to a pre-cooked TV dinner alone and an empty bed.
I
guess not too many of us remember or even know that there was a time,
during generations and way back in the long human history, love letters
and poems were a part of everybody's life, at least for those blessed
enough to have found love, and those in the hope of finding it. Each
letter from your beloved was the first thing you looked for amongst the
day's post. You could tell the one from him/her by that special
handwriting, the colour of the envelope had been chosen to be his/her
signature or to please you. Even slightly scented maybe if the sender
was female. You opened the letter ever so carefully so as not to ruin
it's shape, with your heart pounding, longing, anticipating ...
You
read it in private, fast at first because you were always in a great
hurry to know the entire content; then you went over it slowly, once,
twice, most likely many times. Lines and lines of words, each tenderly
written by hand, wrapped with love that delights and touches the heart
and caresses the soul. You close you eyes for a while, let the words
dance about in your mind, trying to remember them, savour them, before
you lovingly put it away in a special place, together with all the
others, thrilled how that little drawer was filling up, filled to the
brim with love!
That,
lamentably, an lost art today, substituted by SMS on mobiles written
in shorthand and symbols; the one today you decipher to be saying: "
lov U. quickie 2 Nite ur plas? " Or the one less coarse, an email
amongst the dozens you receive each day, looking exactly the same as
the one reminding you to pay your back tax; or the one looking
suspiciously like spam. You pick the one from the new lover you had
fallen head over heel with to click first, only to feel the strange
sensation that you had already read that before ... It's wording is
identical as that you had once from Mr. Wrong or Miss Error, whom you
had sent off packing sometime back. They are both obviously
"something.com" members.
I
have even had some love poems and messages hidden in a web-site
address, which indicated that if I wanted to know what the message was
about, I needed to click on the site URL to find out! Naturally I never
bothered doing so! You see, it's also too much bother for me to find
out.
