I love you? Eviscerate me, we mean to say.
A letter to my summer love:
We often describe love as if it’s something binary; you love someone or you don’t. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s a continuum, it’s a path you go down. Now, you asked me if I thought love was a choice, and I told you that yes, I think it is. I think you choose to continue down that path or not. And I think I’m at a point where I have to choose whether or not to let myself walk that path and fall for you.
That is to say, what I’m asking for from you is permission to fall. Better yet, to dive headfirst.
This has all moved relatively quickly, but I think it’s symptomatic of the short time we have together. There’s been some freedom in the knowledge of the urgency of it all, because what is the point of holding back or pumping the breaks?
Lean in, open yourself up to the vulnerability of feeling what you feel. Say “I’m absolutely crazy about you”. Launch caution out the window with a fucking slingshot. Embrace the sweetness of the transience. Acknowledge that every step down this path makes both the pain and the pleasure so much more acute. And paradoxically, I think something can only be this good when you acknowledge the risk. What would skydiving be if you felt completely safe? Would the nicotine make your brain float the same way if the tar entering your lungs didn’t feel so transactional? Trading a high for seconds, minutes, days of your life? I bet your favourite workouts were when the corners of your vision started to go dark and your lungs burned and you laid on the floor afterwards with the rush of blood pounding in your ears, briefly considering that you just might die here.
I think the potential for the good and the bad; the pain and the joy; love and loss; they expand in proportion to each other.
We arrive at love through obliteration. And so I’m asking you to agree to mutually assured destruction. You know, “do not go gently into the goodnight”, and all that.
Rage against it, with my hand in yours.
A note from the author:
I actually read him this over the phone. He knew my mind had been chewing on something and that I’d been holding back telling him what I was thinking about. So I gave in and read him this: the feelings I’d been trying to make sense of by writing in my notes app at the time. He didn’t interrupt me. Damn, he said when I finished. That was poetic.
Inspiration, writing credits, and parallels:
“We arrive at love through obliteration” is a modified version of the line written by the wonderfully talented Ocean Vuong, from the below passage in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
“Do not go gently into the goodnight” and “Rage against it” are also in reference to the poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas:
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
