Aphorisms on Love

Aphorisms on Love
by Crux Ansata

I came home with the attitude of a defeated general, like someone who went out feeling he had a chance, but, through innocent blunders and unforeseen circumstances, had been defeated.

In Athens, they killed the victorious generals for social reasons. I suppose losing generals were expected to die on the field. "Come back with your shield or on it," to mix city-states. There are no such mercies in love.

The thousands of miles from Texas to New York qualify as a foreign campaign, I'm sure, but I've been told repeatedly I ought not view love as war.

To my mind, they are both variations on the classic power-game.

Our relationship was like a case of terminal cancer. Everyone knew it was going to die, and it was painful for everyone involved. I'm sure it was painful to watch. It just would not die. It kept lingering on. And that made it more painful.

They say every death is a rebirth. Nothing comes from nothing. Life comes from life.

Is it this irrepressible optimism that led me home, sheildless? Or something more sinister, the lack of courage to kill myself? Whichever, I head back.

Is it narcissism to wonder what went wrong? Or is it masochism to relive every second of a three year mutual death over and over? Optimism raises her head: "It is hope; hope that next time you won't lose her." And Pessimism raises his: "So that next time no one will end up as mutilated as you mutilated her. And you."

Once upon a time, I didn't believe love was differentiable. I believed in loving everyone. Now, with a little older objectivity, I know that really means loving no one. But, this crypto-Marxist, all-loving, marriage disbelieving, still felt lonely. Social forces don't warm your bed.

One night, at a party. One night, alone with friends. And then her.

I've been writing this story for years. I'm sick of it, but I've been living it. I'm fascinated with it, as one becomes fascinated with the pebble in one's shoe. No matter how much else may be good, that one pebble is the world. And she is the pebble I can't get out of my shoe.

I get tired of it. I try to turn away. I write about other people, but every woman is her, every man is me. Every relationship is a lingering death.

I stop writing, but I relapse. Writing is not pleasure. Writing is a necessary biological function. I can stop eating for a day or three, but then I get too weak and must eat again. I can't even go that long without writing. Without writing about her.

I turn to the ancient Irish cure, but you can only stay drunk so long. The good thing about the drink is it kills the memory. You have to live through the present, and the past in the present, but when you wake up on the bathroom floor with a toilet full of vomit, you don't have to live that night every successive night for the rest of your life.

The nights I enjoyed most in the present are the most painful in the past-in-present I've been living in since.

She looked so beautiful in that white night gown. Diaphanous. The tenses break down. I can see her, feel her, taste her, now and always. I speak in the past tense, because I can never hold her again. The satiny smoothness of the gown, sliding cool against our skins, and the satiny smoothness of her skin as it slid out of the gown. Nights like this can convert any starry-eyed Gnostic. The flesh may be evil as an abstract. My flesh is evil -- controlling me, paining me, caked with dirt and corrupted with the dirty. Her flesh was never evil, and crushing her to me crushed any anti-flesh prejudices I could have carried to that night. Those nights. Every night in that gown, incense and candles burning, with the sweet fear of being discovered by angry parents. Even in the pain of memory I smile. (And I lie.)

We were going together for months before she saw me in the light. Friends and I would chat about the latest night-fad, vampires, and she'd listen. I didn't realize how much of what we said she understood.

I think I killed our love when I let her know me. I am as worthy as any man, and better than most, but we all need the lies, the myths. We have to fool ourselves and each other into believing we love the perfect. When this hallucination ends, love can't last. Preserving love means preserving lies.

It is a hard lesson to learn.

But it all comes back to that first night. Because our whole relationship was reliving that first night. Every time we went out for coffee after sunset, every time we had sex in a graveyard, even in the deathly, shroud-like quality of that night gown I love so much, we performed rites of sacrifice to our ancestors, the us-of-the-past who gave us birth. The child is the father of the man. Christ, the Son of God, is the Father. In sex, theology becomes reality.

On another night, on another couch, in another state, it all came to an end. Drunk on wine, naked, desperate, pressed into each other, until she snapped into the fetal position and began sobbing.

"I'm seeing someone else."

When are we not? But that is when relationships die. When we forget we are always seeing someone else. We are in constant change, we are constant change. But love dies when we forget the person we love is in flux. All is flux.

The night she could look in my eyes, say that, and mean she could only be seeing someone else in another body, not mine...

That was when love died.

The perfect epitaph. "I'm seeing someone else."

People ask where love goes, the way they ask where someone went when they've died. There is a truth there: Love is like a person. The man will leave his parents, and join his woman, and they shall be one.

This truth disguises another truth. Just as a person "goes" nowhere -- for a person is not a "thing", from the beginning there has never been a thing, a person is a relationship, a unique alignment of attributes -- so too love does not "go" anywhere. It ceases to "be", because the alignment of lovers shifts.

Love lives and dies like people live and die, but love, even the love two people share, is not bound to the metabolic life of people. Our society has long known love can survive the death of the lovers. What I need to learn is that the life of the lovers can survive the death of love.

Do you believe in reincarnation? Love transmigration from body to body? Or is that damned heretic Incurable Optimism speaking again?

Love is not war. Love is about the affirmation of life. War is the denial of life. They are sides of the same coin, but they are as separate as two sides of a line can be, by an unbridgeable -- yet unmeasurable, unquantifiable -- boundary.

My attitude is all wrong. I am not a defeated general. I am an innocent, devastated by the death of a loved one -- our love.

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