Have You Ever Been In Love

Have you ever been in love?

Have you known what it feels like to be able to follow your instincts without worry. Have you known what it's like to compare the color of your lover's eyes to the fallen leaves of autumn after a rainstorm has dulled the colors and shined the surfaces. Have you not been self-conscious about it. Lovers make ridiculous comparisons. Have you accepted "You are the air in my cerebral lungs" as a basic fact, not a flight of fancy. Have you believed that without yourself, someone else would not be able to think. It is far more powerful than believing that without one, another cannot live.

Have you known yourself a muse.

Have you known what it is to lose yourself in someone else's world, and in turn to pull them into your own. Have you known what it is to construct an entirely new reality on the basis of shared understanding, and to stand in that brave new world and laugh at everyone on the outside that can't come in and won't come in and isn't invited in and will never know what we two know or feel what we two feel or the completeness of two people so perfectly complementary.


Have you known what it is like to fit.

Have you known what it is to hear someone's terrible confessions, and to accept them. Not to argue about them, or convince him otherwise. Have you known what it is to let someone tell you their greatest failings, their greatest amoralities, their greatest secrets and simply absorb the knowledge and go on loving. Have you known what it is to love a monster.

But we're all monsters, aren't we. One way or another.

I have loved a monster, and I am become a monster. I have loved a monster and I love a monster still and that has made me the most grotesque and monstrous of things. This love for the blackness of someone else's soul that I carry around in my heart and refuse to cut away has poisoned me and I can't love anymore, not unless you are a monster, too, in which event I will love you like you have never been loved, and never will be loved, because monsters are the easiest to love. His love is a plague, and I will die without the pieces of my heart that he has claimed but I will not die if I keep on loving him in those pieces of my heart. Love cures all ills.

He is the one that taught me survival above all things. He is the reason I can survive his absence, with my wasted heart and my hardened edges.

I have loved a monster, and I am become a monster, and have you ever been in love? Because if you have then you have loved a monster, too. We are all monsters. One way or another.