No Other Way

Some folks, some terribly considerate people, like to say that love is like quicksilver in the hand. Like friendship, set on fire. Love…is like oxygen, is the essence, the be all and end all, what we were all born to do, eventually, with varying degrees of skill.
I personally prefer to consider it an all encompassing disease, snaking up through the soles of your feet in to your calves, worming towards your reproductive organs (for that is, nine times out of ten, where ‘love’ begins), slithering past your digestive tract, stomach, and finally lodging itself inside of your ribcage, very much like a second heart. It will posture, pose, and pulsate from there, leeching you and clouding your vision.

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The pain will come, slowly at first, like an itch you can not relieve no matter how many times your stubby, grubby fingers scrape across it. You’ll scratch, fingernails like sandpaper, creating gaping, infected wounds across your legs, stomach, arms.
Then it will sear, tingle and migrate. You won’t need to scratch for it to spread like cancer, you‘ll be given a few weeks, days or months to live: all good things must come to an end. Doctors will tell you that you are doing fine, but somewhere inside of your chest you feel the weight of stones, boulders. You can’t breathe for love. There is clearly something terribly, irreversibly wrong and you will feel powerless to fix it.

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It will rasp up your throat and burst from your mouth, burning your lungs as your lips part and you scream for the want of it, the need, the dependency of love. No, love is not like the eternal fire of hope, it is more like heroin deliberately forced in to a swollen vein, you need to get high; you need a fix. A mental condition, it shifts inside of your head, schizophrenic in nature, you don’t care who sees your track marks you just want the next dose. The sweet flutter of an eyelid during sleep, a heavy slumbering arm slung across your stomach with your legs entwined within dirty sheets on a hot, sickeningly sweet summer evening in your parents basement. Unstable and volatile, like aged rum, sipped from nectarine halves on a deserted island, forbidden.

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Love is like a serious mental disease. It has vocal chords, hands and feet. It multiples and complicates, disintegrates and shimmers like a mirage, just out of reach, like water or palm trees. There is nothing you wouldn’t do for it once it is inside your head, it is undeniable, disgusting, it rots you from the inside and you try to cleanse yourself of it once you are through, once you’ve consummated, once you’ve tired of it. You have tried love and you have found it wanting, yet you would not have it any other way…

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