She is everything I've ever wanted. Understand-I have lived a life of the mind, I studied mathematics in college, I work with architectural plans, and my livelihood deals in an essential way with imagining what might be. I turn a drawing of a house into a schematic for the trusses that support it, and then real men build them and they are erected into a real thing in which people live out their dreams.

So, I always have at least half of me in what is not real. And she fed my imagination like no other woman I have ever known. Her mind could match mine leap for leap, she understood my fascination with allusion and metaphor, she wept for the same sorrows in the music and art we both liked.

She is almost my age (I am 56, she is 52), but I do not see her so. When she was young, she was beautiful beyond description, but when I see her in my mind she is any-age, the young girl and crone smiling side by side. Her eyes are the twin pillars of judgement and mercy.

Of course, there are complications. She is married, for one. With two sweet children, for another. I never asked of her that she leave her husband, I never asked her to be my lover. A bit inconvenient that life should whisper love in such inappropriate circumstances, and I am glad there is no God, for he would have to answer for this.

I call her "mi reina", for she is from Puerto Rico, and it suits her. And one fine morning, thoughts of her made this song bloom in my head:

Mi Reina

Mi reina, spends all day on the telephone
And somebody wants to know why
She goes out, late, in the afternoon
She says she's just looking at the sky

She calls me, when no one is listening
And drags me away from my bed
I'd like to stay, where it's safe and warm
But I can't get her out of my head

And she says:
So soft, too hard
I'm cut deep, unscarred
You caught me off-guard

And I say:
No need to fear
Too soft to hear
I'm nowhere near

Mi reina, says that something is happening
Something pushing from inside
I ask her, if she'd like to explain to me
And she says she just needs some time to hide

I paint her pictures of a fantasy
With magic dripping everywhere
She laughs, and says that she has to go
With her words still hanging in the air

And she says:
Too fast, so slow
It comes and goes
Where? No one knows.
And I say:
You laugh, but I cry
You live, and I die
I don't know why,

Mi reina....

And sometimes love is just not enough. She says she doesn't even know how, that she doesn't even know what it is. And I wonder: what is the use of anything? Why am I made so, that I do not fit anywhere? And, excuse me for saying so, but these dating sites, with the presupposition that if I clear the steeple-chase of some woman's expectations, that she might finally deign to grant what should be the simplest of things, a simple hello, and the exploration of knowing someone bit by bit, seem the most love-destroying thing I can imagine.