To Overcome

On the shores of this consistency,

no battle cries emerge.

In the ferocity of these callous waves,

none too merciful stand guard.

My lighthouse is no shelter,

for he belongs to no one and none to him.

His reserve is a necessity

the depths of the ocean command.

Brutality in them is innate-

survival otherwise unfathomable.

Endless is the stormy peril from

streams all too conscious to really exist.

Gluttonous consumption

replaces a desire all too familiar

for satisfaction.

The wave cannot hear the waverer-

he floats amidst the illusion of fear.

Unbeknown to the fact

that immortality awaits at the

foothills of His rescue boat....

Broken Hearts

It isn’t human not to feel lonely and it isn’t human not to be afraid…

...screams Francesca Johnson at the man who, she tries to convince herself, is void of all human emotion and integral complexities. A man who she has fallen passionately in love with; a man who is the sole embodiment of a destiny she imagined and a desire long suppressed; a man who is consequently not her husband. A man who she has fallen in love with…in four days.

I wonder whether it's a personally profound interpretation or some unexplainable, other-worldly connection to a character, when you turn away from the screen and realise that you are the only one in the living room that feels anything but contempt for this adulterous woman.

The Bridges of Madison County follows the story of Francesca Johnson, an Italian war bride living in Iowa whose glasshouse of compromised reality is shattered by the mysterious, world-renowned photographer, Robert Kincaid.
Francesca is essentially an extraordinarily exotic spirit, tamed by her surroundings and the stark contrast between her imagination and reality. She envisions an America that is greater than mankind; a place not only inhabiting opportunity and luxury, but the essence of true love - where free spirits, immersed in the many different colours of human emotion, caress each other with the soft tenderness of Yeats, profound, fulfilling conversation and experience beautifully intense physical desires towards that perfect entity - signaling a complete union.
Her reality, however, condones a rather less glamorous lifestyle. That is until Robert Kincaid...

"How [a room full of my cousins & two sisters, ask] can you fall so in love with someone in four days?! It's impossible."
"It's not love, it's lust!"
"She's so desperate - the bitch! She practically throws herself on top of him."
"It is essentially all about sex. That's all she wants from him".
"How can she do that to her husband?! Her kids! She's just selfish", they profess in outrage.

I, either in my obvious naivety or in my blind faith that they would appreciate a character as being three-dimensional considering she is after all HUMAN, raved about how wonderfully tragic this film was and how they'd all be in tears by the end of it. Quite the contrary!
It did, instead, spark a magnificent debate, which undoubtedly illustrates just how powerful the story is.

Love, says Francesca, does not obey our expectations. "Its mystery is pure and absolute". And so you ask yourself, does one ever really ‘love’ or does one simply love the idea of ‘being in love’ – essentially, falling in love with love itself. Is there a time frame; can you fall in love with someone in four days? Does one fall in love with another, or with the ‘idea’ of this other – or what he or she represents?
Undoubtedly, Robert for Francesca signifies the unknown – the unpredictable, untamable, adventurous ‘outsider’ – essentially, the life she had envisioned in her dreams. He appears as a saviour, rescuing her from the mundane “details” her life has become involuntarily infested with.
Yet, the reality still stands. Francesca made a choice; to marry, to have children, to leave Italy. The foundations upon which those choices were made are irrelevant on account of her adultery…right?
She professes, “When a woman makes the choice to marry, to have children; in one way her life begins but in another way it stops. You build a life of details. You become a mother, a wife and you stop and stay steady so that your children can move. And when they leave they take your life of details with them. And then you're expected to move again only you don't remember what moves you because no-one has asked in so long. Not even yourself”.

Meryl Streep, unsurprisingly, plays Francesca Johnson with such great precision that one cannot help but become mercilessly consumed with the internal construct of this character. Despise her or pity her; Francesca’s impact is unavoidable.
So, we move on. Does Francesca strike a chord because she embodies multiple realities of women we all know? Or perhaps she possesses characteristics that secretly fester within each and every one of us.
Francesca declares, “You never think a love like this can happen to you”. Does she mean the love she feels towards Robert or the feeling of love itself? Perhaps she’s referring to the union between them, or maybe the love he bestows upon her. How does she reach this conclusion if a love like this has indeed, never ‘happened’ to her before? Where does the comparison stand?
If you’ve never experienced an emotion – any emotion – with such intensity before, is it right to give that experience a new name? Or even maybe a new platform of comparison?

For example, I know I’ve never felt this way before and I know I only felt this way upon his arrival. He fucks up and leaves. I experience a new emotion, with great intensity.
Categorically, I fell in love without knowing it, then had my heart broken and then realized I was either close to being in love or was, in fact, in love with the man who fucked up, prior to him doing so. Yet this person, who you supposedly fell in love with or were in the processing of falling in love with, broke your heart. In which case, does he not then become somebody else – and not, essentially, the individual you had perceived him to be? In which case, you couldn’t possibly have loved him – but instead, the ‘idea of him’ – an idea you constructed from perception and not from reality. Thus suggestively, you fell in love with the perceived idea of ‘being in love’.

Bitter, consequential reassurances? Maybe.

Or maybe, the truth about a truth that exists only in the subjective mind. One might even, then, fall in love with the morbid reality itself – a broken heart is incurable, after all. In every silence it looms...lingers; threatening to emerge from its dark slumber from within that consciously abandoned yet subconsciously occupied corner in your mind. It is, undeniably, as attached to me as [dare I say it] I am to it.
After all, what does one have left of the person who broke your heart but the broken heart itself?