One Thing it Was

Of course it was animus projection
or neurosis or even a psychotic
episode. It was co-dependence and
lack of proper attachment to home.

It was my search for God, as you said,
my Dionysian-lack. My yen to frequent
artists. My weakness for Italian males.
Call it a recherche du temps perdu

(we were fifty). It was my Emily Dickinson
question for a spiritual bliss and a fatal
infatuation. It was my old trick of giving
in-order-to receive, my compulsive obsession.

It was failed bonding with our significant
others, or a lack of independence combined
with emotional immaturity. It was my
unliberated woman's leaning on the wrong

men. It was also repressed fixations on
my father, and surely mother issues too,
and sibling ones as well. Was it failure to pray?
It was unfaithfulness, and guilt, and sin. But then

after all the labeling, the fashionable name-calling
and blaming and nit-picking second guesses,
some simple, quite outmoded facts
remain: one thing it was was love.

-The Paris Review