While many pressing problems have paralysed me, it is love that is on my mind. And it is on my mind in the way a look from a stranger is on your mind where you cannot help but wonder if you left a story stranded on the pavement by not smiling in return. And now, I am compelled to bring a glass of wine and this modern-day typewriter in the bedroom and talk about how I love. And how I love is at odds with the rules of the world I live in, and it has caused me great heartache—not fracture but myalgia. The heart is but a muscle after all—or at least, full of it—and the hurt has been how a muscle pulses with pain as you sit with your gaze fixed on the plain-white ceiling, waiting for sleep to smother you. But hurt aside, I love immediately, quickly, and with naivete, and I can spin some sprawling story about it, but it will be a lie. And so, in all that I have thought about, I have realised that I cannot help but love how I love, and I cannot help myself, and I cannot stop this perpetual pulse of puncturing pain.
It is not in me to be subtle. If I love you, I trust you immediately like a child. For the better part of the last decade, I have learned that this is the wrong way, and when I say wrong, I simply mean that it is not the most accepted way, and often, it makes all the difference. It is not in me to think about the consequences. All I can see is a breakfast of brightness or a brunch brimming with booze, or perhaps, evenings filled with the sweet and soft comfort of nothingness. That is all I can think of when I look at the next person—of which there have been enough and many—and I throw my heart like a dart on the wall. It sticks if it does, or it falls off most disappointingly. That is how I love. I hand over the keys to my life, then leave the door open and suggest they were unnecessary.
I will hand you my heart. And I will watch as you forget it at a cafe we may never visit together again. I will watch you break a piece, keep it to yourself, and I will say nothing. And I have so much of it. I have so much love to give. I do not know how to love like the world does.
And if I love you, you will know, and years will pass, and I will remember you fondly still.
I do not know how to forget.