nails hammer heart

I think that true, deep love doesn't make you act crazy. Or insane or infatuated or tear-your-hair out jubilant. The reason we act crazy when we are infatuated is because we want it to be authentic so terribly - if we could, we would jump over the distance of wrenching time that makes real love what it is. We would dismiss the desperate clawings of the heart, the jealous sudokus of the mind- we would tear through painful barriers with a trapeze artist's sense of artistry. It both blinds and pulls at us so urgently, so insistently.

Maybe this is just a want and desire to catapult oneself into the future. Maybe that's the trick of romance: that crazy infatuation love is so much brighter and captivating and turns so many more sharp corners so quickly.

The headshaking exhilaration of bumper cars, did I just do THAT? You, 19, and I am 22. Now. I love you, you love me. Easy. I am here, now.

Much more exciting than the real thing. But I think real love, at its finest, makes you feel like you are bursting open, like this. Like hearing a beautiful song, or reading a beautiful poem, or hearing a wonderful story, and the tears come and you don't know precisely why.

It doesn't hurt; it hurts in a way that isn't hurting, that we don't have a word for. Largeness. Enormity. Expansive beauty. It takes a real strength, a real grace, to stand up straight in the face of that. Especially if you're not familiar with it. And I am not, but somehow in losing you, my love, I can see it so sharply and clearly, and it burns my eyes and sears my heart: I love you, I love you, I love you.