I'm not in love with you.

loosely paraphrased from Jeanette Winterson's Gut Symmetries:

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"What would it be to love? Would it be the fields under rain, the vivid green that grass takes? Would it be the air current the bird finds? Would it be the fox and the fox hole? Would it be natural at all? Would it be lucky find or magic trick? Buried treasure or sleight of hand? Would I be the conjuror or the conjured? Would it be a spell or a song I sing?

I [should] love you as a bird loves flight, as meat loves salt, as dog loves chase, as water finds its own level.

Or I [should] not love you at all."

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I never thought I'd be on the other end; never thought it could hurt quite so much. It's a different scourge, but it cuts just as deep.

[fin]

more than words

art by Sarah Howell

cosmic marionettes
should speak not
but express

not movement
but motion
not activity
but action

if music be the language of the gods
then dancing would be as sacred an accompaniment
of gestures

even for the divine
words are sometimes not enough

Stephen Fry on First Loves

I’m assuming that most people [experience] their first love when they’re teenaged: that unbelievable hole that opens up inside them of longing and yearning, of pain, of joy, that huge great bundle of toxic emotions allied to beauty and - opening out into nature and - to glory - suddenly connecting you with every love poet and every love song ever written - that explosion in my head and heart will never be matched.

You can never hope to recapture the "first fine careless rapture", as the poet put it, but it stays with you like a good acid trip. You get a little flashback every now and again. It will never leave you and it teaches you to look at things differently and to feel things differently. It educates your soul, if you like.

All first love is unrequited, ultimately, because it’s so huge. It’s such an act of giving and it requires so much back that it can never be given back! and in that - [you wouldn’t necessarily want to give them back]. It’s like an atom bomb. It’s all the energy of who you are and who you want to be and what you love and what you hope to be. It explodes and it is impossible for a single human being to offer that back to you in a mutual way. It would be like matter meeting antimatter. It’s sort of almost important that what you do is worship and yearn and long.

That was to me of course the single most important thing in my life and occasionally I get dreams. I’m back there again and I’m still as trembly as ever I was and I get - because I’ve written about it - I get emails and Twitters, whatever from people in adolescence who are going through the same thing and say, “Oh, I read your book and it was the same for me and it is the same for me and he’ll never look at me, she’ll never look at me.” “What can I do?” “I’ll make a fool of myself.” “Should I write them a poem?” And, “What if they reject me?” And, “oh my God.” And I read that and weep at the... You know these vast sagas, these romantic sagas that are played out in every school, in every village and every town and every country in the world - it’s going on - it’s all this massive emotional energy just spreading outwards and... some of it ends terribly unhappily.

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from the Big Think "Interview with Stephen Fry", December 8, 2009, "First Love Is Always Unrequited".