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Am I the only one so blessed,
The one your green-eyed goddess spurns—
Who shrugs when love deserts the nest
And shrugs again when she returns;
Who wryly welcomes flesh or word
From moths who fan some other flame;
Who hears you out, but thinks absurd
These salves for needless scabs of shame?
For is not ‘love’ a child of need,
No matter how the sonnets run?
Why bare a wound where guilt will breed?
And am I, then— the only one?
I do not know what ‘love’ (as espoused in Western literature) is. Nor do I know anyone else who knows. All I do know is that throughout my life I have watched others - friends, acquaintances and strangers - tormented by sexual jealousy. And I know, too, that I have stood, bewildered, wondering what the hell was (and still must be) missing from my own well of emotions and impulses. Truly, I have never felt even the slightest breath of its presence. As far as sexual jealousy is concerned, I must have been hiding behind a door when the gods doled it out!
Or, as the mystery writer Dorthy L. Sayers once put it:
As I grow older and older
And totter toward the the tomb,
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.
Me too, Dorothy; me too. Except that is how I have felt all my life.
