Is It Wrong to Love So Many?

She is fast. Her shape is something out of a dream. Her lines are a French curve of narrow to wide in all the right places. She has a great set of tubes and her headset is solid as the day she was born. It is pressed in, as is her bottom bracket, built to last. When we spin together out in the wind, she sings as the air flows over smooth surface of her clear coat. Everything about her says come with me, live your wildest dreams, take me for my beauty, my strength, my firm but forgiving flex.

But I am not faithful to her. There are others. She is from the Midwest, an American classic. Though I love her for her stability, I am smitten with an Italian who is a master-work of style. She is exotic, just as fast, but more forgiving. With her I get into trouble, spend too much money, take risks I have no business taking. She is art, style, beauty, panache. I cannot ever rise to her level of finesse, her Italian hunger for rich, refined, cultivated experience. I will go broke for her, sacrifice respectability, leave home in pursuit of the dream that is she and I alone, on the road, top down. Her satin touch sends me into abandon of my senses. I am hers.

I am torn. On the one hand, I have commitments, integrity, reputation to uphold. I hold some social position, have a place in a larger community. On the other hand, my heart can't sit still, is restless. It is under a spell, cut open, bisected. I don't know how to respond.

While one is strength, stability, and a work-horse, the other speaks elegance, flair, and passion. They kindle the fires of my divided self, my factions warring for say in how to live. Protein shakes vs. fine wine, prudence vs. extravagance. I hold the baby up and ask them, which half they want if I cut it in two. I feel pressured to decide. 

I do have a conscience, after all. I don't want to divide my affections or to be thinking of one when I am with the other.

Then there is the one that lives up north. She is wild and travels only on the natural winding trails of mountains. She lives the rural life of star-lit nights and the hoots of owls, coyotes, mountain lions. What to do about her?

All of them fill me with life and love. They also break me. Some have thrown me to the ground or the road, have left me broken, dislocated, bleeding. You pay a great price for love. My friends say none of them is good for me. They don't come around so much anymore because of my lunacies. My mother, rest her soul, warned me about this kind of thing.

Like an alcoholic or Don Quijote charging wind mills, I need help, an intervention.