On Love
Sara Nicholson

1

Our awkward attempts at conversation. All we have. I gave you a piece of me. You gave me a piece of you. Very small pieces. Over many years. Shards, droppings. Love. All we have.

2

He tastes like cigarettes, which I like. His body, like sweat and wet hair. His mouth smells, from wine. His arm is heavy, but I lift it as he’s sleeping, up and down, for no reason. The door has just blown open from the wind.

3

In all these years I’ve learned nothing, know nothing. Even the few things I know, I don’t. Don’t even know that. The one thing I do know is I’m almost there, at the end of this life. The least I can do is be honest. I can’t.

4

Stendhal, in his book De l’amour, calls the process of falling in love a “crystallization”: those afflicted by love build intricate fantasies out of the meagerest of details, and from this crystalline structure love is born. He is said to have written it epiphanically, on little scraps of paper furiously jotted down, and to have wept over the proofs.

5

The long history of love. Tied inextricably with beauty, with death. It meant so much, I barely noticed. All that struggle and rage and heartbreak, for all time, everlasting and now dust. It meant everything. It was all for nothing.

6

I look to great literature to blast apart the consolation good literature provides.

7

There’s something fey about oblivion. I mean the word itself. It could be a fairy’s name: Titania and Oblivion. A dewdrop of wine on my lover’s chin. The smear of red at the bottom of his glass. A fallen whisker. Oublié. A record left on for hours, skipping in the groove. The literati in obliteration. The end of every poem. My own life, to have grown up among.

8

The cat yowls at night. Never during the day. She must desire something, even if it is just to assert her existence. To find out if anyone else is awake. 

9

How sick I am. Wanting what I can’t have. What I don’t want. Please love me. Don’t poke me too hard. That beautiful note you sent, could it be a review?

10

For about a month, I think I experienced what Stendhal calls amour passion. I had all the classic symptoms of this “disease of the soul”: depression, obsession, no food, no sleep. Still I don’t think love is a disease, as Stendhal says, but rather an affliction à la Simone Weil: “It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God’s mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness.” Exhausted by love’s tyranny you forfeit and, at the instant of your miraculous surrender, love is sweet.

11

Get away from me, my love. Your proximity is death. What I need. Fucking go. Please kiss me. Don’t make me beg. 

12

We begin, so they say, by loving one person. But as we climb the ladder of love this focused beam diffuses and scatters, as afternoon light over the sea. This must be what saints feel, an erotic dispersal, wherein love becomes something akin to birdsong, anonymous and freely given away, passionately, lyrically, to all and none.

13

I’m not sure what the word means, love. It feels forbidden to say so. To ask a question so obviously cliché that it’s cliché to say it’s cliché. I feel a little thrill at breaking the rule. It must have meant something, the first time I said it to you. But given time, love becomes phatic, as emptied of its denotation as a “How are you?” “Fine.”

14

After Kierkegaard. An old man is writing an account of his life. Naturally, it will touch on the subject of love. The trouble is, he only has a single sheet of paper: as he works he is aware of the ever-shrinking amount of space left to him, so his handwriting begins to shrink. When he reaches the end of the page, the script is so tiny as to be all-but illegible. So he turns the paper on its side, writes cross-wise over the up-down in the tiniest script he can manage. Now the whole page is completely unreadable, and he hasn’t gotten half his love down. The harder he tries to decipher his writing the more thoroughly he is reduced, through strain, to tears.

15

Some writers spill their thoughts onto the page. Others agonize over every word, every choice. Only the latter, those perfectionists, understand love: the heart in conflict after something unreachable. Agony.

16

He didn’t give me enough, not nearly enough. So I let it be enough. And it was.