LOVE: WHEN WE MAKE LOVE

Each time I saw her smile, hope and joy rose up inside me I was reminded by her beauty, and by her gestures, which were so dear to me, and by her luminous skin, that the center of the world, the center to which I must travel, was at her side. What I wanted to say was, It is enough for me to sit beside her.When we were naked, finally, we were standing up, and then she had her hands on my back and she was kissing me....I was thinking: she can have every inch of me.. To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth—I count that something of a miracle. Our lovemaking is so stormy and theatrical that we keep tearing into each other, I think we’re trying to find each other’s souls, knowing they must be in there somewhere, close to our undernourished hearts .I loved her body and I could never have enough of regarding it as a world in which I could wander and wander without fear. That sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer. At the heart of sex is something intrinsically spiritual, the desire for a union so primal it can be called divine and as the minutes passed I became acutely aware of her breathing—even, rhythmic—and soon found that my own had matched her tempo. How she could soothe me, without even trying, how we connected on this most basic frequency made my heart ache for something impossible...and then my soul saw you and it kind of went “Oh there you are. I’ve been looking for you.” So yes, we could kiss. I could kiss her and she would kiss me and we would collide, like atoms in some scientist’s wet dream. We could start a new universe together. We could mix like a disease. And if we do, I hope we never get better. It may have just been a moment to her, but it changed every single one that followed for me. She was the best parts of all the songs I love.I could feel her. Every part of her. Her soul was sewn to mine. Her heated blood flowed through my veins. ... There was no part of me that was not her. The only jewels she wanted was my eyes regarding her with admiration; the only necklace that of my breath on her skin as I kiss her throat; I want to go back to bed and get inside her. That’s the only time there’s anything approaching peace. She is closer to me than my skin—that’s how much she was a part of me. I did the simplest thing in the world. I leaned down…and kissed you. And the world cracked open. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss, for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as Time itself. As the adjective is lost in the sentence, so I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—you have enchanted me with a single kiss which can never be undone until the destruction of language.

It’s so hard to describe. It’s not like love at first sight, really. It’s more like...gravity moves. When you see her, suddenly it’s not the earth holding you here anymore. She does. And you would do anything for her, be anything for her...You become whatever she needs you to be, whether that’s a protector, or a lover, or a friend, or a brother. Death would be a trivial event as long as I loved her. But before I had even quite realized that I was attracted to her—well, I knew I was because I wanted to be more like her than I was like myself— and I realized with a sort of shock what I wanted to do. Dear God, I wanted to put my hands on her.. I wanted to put a hand on her face or on her arm because I thought that if I did that, I would be so happy. I just wanted to feel her skin and I wanted to get at the soul underneath that muscle because I could smell it. Once someone has bound your heart, she’s the only person who can let it lose again. The first time her skin had touched me..the world had changed, grown warmer but also more expansive. I bury these things in my heart—the feel of her under my fingers, the taste of her on my mouth. I’ll need them, like talismans, to survive an impossible journey.I have a thousand images of you in an hour; all different and all coming back to the same … when you’re young, you think that sex is the culmination of intimacy. Later you discover that it’s barely the beginning. You see, I know what I mean when I say that I love you. I don’t have a problem about that. You’re the bit that was missing. The bit that makes me feel whole. And when I ain’t seen you for a while, I start feeling empty inside. And when I do see you, I get—I get this burst of excitement inside. And sometimes when you’re asleep next to me, I just lie there and I look at you. And I never get bored. That’s what I mean when I say I love you.

If you have sex with someone you care about there’s a good chance your heart will be crushed eventually. But why are you so afraid of having your heart crushed? It’s not anywhere close to the worst thing that can happen to you. It might feel like the worst thing for a while, but it’s not. Far worse is a sexless, loveless life ruled by fear, in other words, ..true intimacy isn’t a cluster fuck or a psychodrama. It isn’t the “highest highs and lowest lows.”  It’s a tiny bit of those things on occasion with a whole lot of everything else in between. It’s communion and mellow compatibility.Love lives not in places nor even bodies but in the spaces between them, the long and lovely sweep of air and sky, and in the living heart and memory until that is gone, too, and we are all of us wanderers, as we have always been upon the earth.

A million light years and a million more would not give time enough to store that small second of eternity when I took you in my arms and you took me in yours. You began to be irreplaceable for me long before I had ever heard of you.. Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much love or two little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It’s like your sunlight and water—the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish. it.  I don’t believe that in order to be interesting or meaningful, a relationship has to work out—in fiction or in real life. In fact, I consider a forced happy ending in a book almost as bad as a real couple who get married even though their friends know they shouldn’t. … Now, believe me, I love swelling music and kisses at sunset as much as the next person; when I was growing up, my family crowded around the TV to watch The Love Boat. But as I’ve gotten older, I realized that when it comes to love, it’s the journey that matters as much as the destination. And the messiness is part of what makes romance so fascinating in the first place. Movies and books lead us to believe that if a relationship doesn’t end in marriage, it didn’t count, but that’s absurd. Even unrequited crushes can provide hard-won insights into ourselves and our lives. I have come to be fascinated with the messiness of desire, of mitigating circumstances; with the ways people fit themselves together, take themselves apart for each other, for want of each other, of some parts of each other, be it companionship, be it great sex, be it brilliant insight or common sense.

Whether you’ve been in a relationship for ten years or ten weeks, you know how crazy love can make you. On any given day you’re insanely happy, maniacally miserable, kooky with contentment, or bonkers with boredom—and that’s in a good relationship. Why do you think we call it being “madly” in love? You have to be a little nuts to commit yourself, body and soul, to one other person—one wonderful, goofy, fallible person—in the hope that happily-ever-after really does exist. And yet we can’t help ourselves. We throw ourselves into love time and again, even though we know real-life love is no fairy tale. We stress out and make up and do it all over again—and why? Because nothing makes us feel more alive than the exhilaration and exasperation of everyday love. Real love can whirl you from the glory of ecstasy from the hell of misery and back again, but that’s just how it goes in real life, and aren’t we lucky to be part of that dance? Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there’s always that day. That day is always in your possession. That’s the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don’t. Not always.