10.19.07
Note to Self
You have not loved until love has stayed, unbidden, and over the course of myriad minor eternities and multitudinous brevities has recreated you, poisoned you, saved you, possessed you, freed you, ignored you, inspired you, exhausted you, succored and wounded you, maddened you and given you sanity. You have not loved until you have utterly and irrevocably forgotten what came before it, how you survived without it, how anything meant anything at all before it arrived, like a thief in the night, to lay abed with you and partake (sometimes in the preparation, sometimes in the eating, sometimes both) of your fulsome repasts, midnight and midday snacks, and meager breakfasts, with never a promise that it would do the dishes — though sometimes, with seeming randomness, it does.
Love is both the systemic/holistic grande apparence of a single member of the clade Homo sapiens in all her or his psyche’s glory and folly and the spirit of Hermes loosed in a miner’s chapeau as that a-priori-juggernaut ipso-facto-spelunker sings “This Little Light of Mine”. Love is a mysterious, compelling, fascinating, larger-than-life guest who may be mistaken for an angel or devil or god or schizophrenic — but almost never for a golem — when first it arrives at one’s door; it is none of these. Love may stay. It will probably bring gifts made of Tiffany wrapped in burning magnesium and/or carnival glass wrapped in tiffany on the Twelfth Night, just because. Love might move in on a whim, or after great deliberation. In any case, know beforehand that love will use your shampoo and toothbrush, but you will not care — because love’s hair will smell more wonderful than a recent shampooing warrants and its teeth will be whiter than the Pearly Gates of Marilyn Monroe’s haunted laughter. Love will ask you to do things which, if you do them, will seem totally unreasonable in retrospect, and if you do not, will seem like they were entirely sensible and leave you to wallow in self-recrimination. Love will bite you and kiss you. Love will screw you over, on, and under the table. Love will ask for chastity as it shows you naked pictures of its soul drawn in invisible ink. Love will ask you to buy it fine wine and tampons… on your day off… after waking you from a nap. Love will make it up to you.
