#1-2 "Love"

<http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/1539215/top-50-love-songs-the-word-cloud>

Double Entendre of Love

by Daniel M

Love was a sign that I was alive

Thinking of my special one all night

After billions of clock ticks I fell asleep

Beating sound of my heart got me awake

The meaning of life I learned every morning

When you and I run into each other, thinking

It’s the freshest air I’d ever smelled, saying

“Thank God I have another day to see you”

Every time you held my hand and we hugged

I’ve never felt this way before, feeling beloved

I thought we would never let each other go, I trust

I thought you and I would last forever, no it’s a must

“See you”

My glass of tears your two words broke

Tears were spilled to-wards everywhere on

My face, spoiled my taste, gained the greatest pain

In every moment I glanced at your smile

Shattered pieces of glass ‘teared’ my heart

Pain wasn’t for a while, I ran a thousand miles

Without direction I just wandered, man, is this fiction?

Just to forget your lies and our time together

To promise myself I would never try to-get-her

After billions of clock ticks I fell asleep

Thinking of my special one all night

Love was a sign that I was dead

Love

by dongseokkoh

To start off a rather emotionally intertwined anecdote, how about a simple riddle? What becomes harder the more you understand it, and more painful the more you appreciate it? As I learned through my personal experience, the inevitable answer is love. And this about love, I felt through the many years I lived without my father, who lived 10,594 kilometers away, tuned into the last inning of a baseball game while I was at school, and woke up for another long day’s work while I snuggled in bed .

Having lived in numerous cities around the world, I absorbed different learning environments and cultural communities - and by the time I had graduated elementary school, my parents agreed it would be best for me to study abroad. Thus started my six-year journey in Toronto, where I immigrated with my mother for educational purposes. We called my father every day of the week around 6:30, unless daylight savings pulled it an hour early. I told him about my new friends Alex and Nik, rabbits and squirrels dancing about on our lawn, and how it snowed in early October. And as years passed, topics moved on. I talked about applying for universities, rethinking the points in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and planning a backpacking trip around Europe with Alex and Nik. Later when I met my father during summer break, I had grown a bigger appetite than him by grade 8, loomed over his shoulders by grade 10, and driven our SUV as well as he did  (an optimistic thought) by graduation.

And amidst these natural transitions also came a change of mind. I grew from an immature child who casually ignored the hardships that my parents endured to an appreciating son who acknowledged the burdens my mother and father took on- which quite frankly, wasn’t easy. Soon, I started to genuinely realize that my father had lived lonely months and years without his loved ones by his side: that he would wake up in the morning to the cold breeze instead of my mother’s simmering soybean paste stew filling up the house with its pleasant warmth, that during the day he would suddenly want to hear his wife on the phone but hesitate to press the numbers as she would still be asleep on the other side of the world,and that he would come back to an unlit home, where his wife nor son wouldn’t be standing by the door to welcome him back.

I loved my father then and I love my father now- that never changed. However, once I perceived the many moments my father had felt during our vacancy, I ached inside that I had not recognized such troubles earlier. I understood my parents’ sacrifice and while thankful I also felt an irresistible heartrending sadness.

And that, folks, is why love becomes harder the more you understand it, and more painful the more you appreciate it.