Love

LOVE
by
John Worth

I hate it,
that feeling:
Love.
A sin, that’s all it is,
it is the weakness of all;
every species, every fiber of existence, feels it.
Even atoms, in their carbon bonds—
even that can be called my hate:
Love.

It is like a drug.
It is a drug.
It gives you great feeling at first,
grand nostalgia, weightless happiness;
but when it wears off,
it leaves a longing, an emptiness.
You feel like dried dog-droppings,
forgotten, forlorn, alone.
And then you need it again,
to feel normal, but not to feel happy,
just to feel yourself, simply to feel.
And the virginal quality feeling is gone,
and you delve into artificial longing and compassion—
Just to feel.

Love,
it has a face.
It sits across from me now, across the library.
The face seems to be God’s own painting of Heaven.
A rendering of Paradise upon skin.
Her mouth moves:
a voice I’ve never heard
speaking from a mind that I’ve never known.

For the longest time I’ve stayed away,
from that beauty,
the cause of my hate:
Love.
I did not know quite what I was afraid of:
the addiction of love, then, the loss of it afterwards;
or was it the fear of the beginning, how it could end?

People are all allergic to drugs
and some people have stronger reactions to them then others.
The initial taste
could be fatal,
it could even kill.
Love,
it is the same:
that first talk,
those first words uttered to Beauty,
they might be returned with bullets, missiles, knives,
and they would strike you down,
scar you.

I knew not which fear drove me
into the silence I inhabited.
I had been torn for so long,
for the three years I had been in this school,
for the three years I had had to watch her,
see her,
Love her.

I don’t know what finally compelled me
to approached the Beauty,
the living Heaven.
Maybe it was the feeling of being a coward.
(I could hear the chanting voices in my head, “Sissy! Sissy!”)
Or maybe,
the power of the drug had overtaken me.
I had been overpowered.

Whatever drove me to speak to her,
it disguised itself:
she usually sat with friends,
but today she sat alone;
I felt pity—
this was the drug’s disguise—
so I went over.

I spoke to her,
but when she looked up to meet my eyes,
the radiance was blinding.
My words trembled upon my tongue,
and I was afraid:
Was I sweating?
And then she smiled.
And she said she’d love it if I sat with her and kept her company.

That radiance,
its brilliance was suddenly tolerable,
and I saw Her;
not the Beauty I had mistaken her for all this time,
but a simple Her,
complete with skin a bit too pale,
freckles a bit too numerous,
and front teeth a bit too buck.

And suddenly the drug,
Love,
it didn’t feel quite so bad,
quite as horrid as I imagined.
And I sat down,
and we talked,
and talked,
and talked,
and here I began to believe:
maybe Love, maybe it wasn’t a drug,
an addiction,
a sin.
Maybe that was its disguise to all those inexperienced with it,
just as Beauty was the disguise for Her.

Maybe it all wouldn’t end in a downward spiral,
a descent into depression and despair.
And for the first time
I related a word completely different with this feeling:
Hope.