Is this love, is this love, is this love, that I am feeling?

 It is Valentine Day again and I am sure you are waiting for my usual 14th of February post about love.

This year I will focus again on another form of love: love that should have never been. And I am not talking about the inappropriate love of secretaries for their bosses (or the other way around), but of something entirely different. 

I was not sure about the angle that I would take till this morning when in spite of reason and wisdom I decided to go ice skating on a local frozen pond. 

Considering the fact that I have not been skating since a couple of years, that I am not exactly at my fittest and definitely forty plus, this idea could be categorized as sheer madness. But I simply could not resist. What was that was attracting me so badly? Very simple, I LOVE ice skating and the idea that I could skate in my back yard really made my heart race.

So now it is out, ice skating is one of the greatest loves of my life since I was a small child watching the likes of Katarina Witt and Tara Lipinski swirling on the ice. I was imagining myself in the most elaborated choreographies, triple jumping and pirouetting on the most beautiful melodies. But this was all very unfortunate considering not so much my capabilities but my environment and situation.

Being born in a place where it never freezes and the only ice around can be found in cubes in a refreshing cocktail, did not make this love of mine easily come into fruition. I did learn the very basics of ice skating, almost entirely by myself in the brief week a year when we went skiing in the Alps. But the pace of development was not really at Olympic level. After 10 years I could

• Stand
• Move forward
• Move backward
• Curve crossing my skates
• Stop

Very very meager, especially if compared with the visions in my head.

But then I moved to the Netherlands where there is a lot of ice and my hopes went up, only to find out that Dutch people only use the skates to go round and round and round. What's the point and above all the beauty in that I asked myself then (and I still do now). 

I pushed back my feelings again for more than a decade. But you know, true love is not easily quenched (and many examples in history, literature, Netflix and my aunt remind us that) so when I reached the midlife crisis, I stumbled in an add in a local paper. Figure skating lessons for adult beginners.

I went for it but the dream only lasted for six months and left me scarred (not literally but actually, I fell and burst my eyebrow) and defeated. I had to go back loving ice skating only at a distance, for who knows how long.

And this is the point of love that should have never been, even though it will never be truly fulfilled, it will never go away, we only need to learn how to live with it without it getting too much in the way of our real life and our ligaments.