Goodbye kiss

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When I was a child, I fell in love as a child.

But when I became a man, I put away childish things, though I never stopped falling in love. Now the time is shorter between falling in love, and realising it’s over, and cannot be saved. Now I see through a glass, clearly.

At the beginning of David Copperfield, we read, of his mother:

Can I say of her face – altered as I have reason to remember it, perished as I know it is – that it is gone, when here it comes before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that I may choose to look on in a crowded street?

Later:

I am glad to recollect that when the carrier began to move, my mother ran out at the gate, and called to him to stop, that she might kiss me once more. I am glad to dwell upon the earnestness and love with which she lifted up her face to mine, and did so.

When I had read that, under the impression that David's mother was about to die before he could see her again, I slept and dreamed I kissed you, and no dream-kiss has ever been more vivid. So intense was that kiss that it awoke me, and I knew immediately that Clara's kisses for David had inspired the dream. And I knew immediately that this could never happen in life, just as David was never to kiss his mother again.

I was wrong about the second part, but not about the first.

Melancholy is sadness you have to accept. David's mother does eventually die. You're still here, yet you seem more far away than she does.