At bedtime, I read a couple Amelia Bedelia stories to my youngest daughter while she rested her head in the crook of my shoulder. Then I got sleepy and turned off the light and drifted off for a moment. My daughter tapped my nose to wake me up. I told her I had started dreaming and closed my eyes again. Then she tapped my nose again and asked me what I was dreaming now, “Something about bottles. Let me see if I can have another dream and if my eyes start moving wake me up again.” Then I closed my eyes and drifted off again. And again she tapped me awake, her eyes shiny and bright with curiosity. “Bananas”, I said. And this went on a couple more times before my wife found me and made me get back to work.
People do not realise how feral love can make them. When they feel truly understood, recognised by another soul, they do not speak about the animalistic desires you get when you meet your soulmate.
Desire starts becoming possession, you want to consume their presence, be near in absurd excess, want their scent caught in the collar of your clothes and sheets, in the air around your body. They stop looking like an ordinary body; every movement acquires charge, and the sound of their footsteps approaching can rearrange your pulse. The air that has touched their skin starts to feel consecrated, and even wind becomes compromised by them.
Physical closeness is never enough; you want to enter some deeper order of contact, reach the place in them from which their presence emanates, touch whatever it is that lives behind their eyes, whatever secret current animates their gestures, whatever invisible arch makes them themselves. The body becomes unbearable, it's just not enough to contain what is being felt.
Their existence alone becomes catalytic, and sometimes even their absence does. There are people whose presence electrifies you, but there are rarer people whose mere facticity alters the temperature of existence. You wake up with a strange obedience to life, the world looks rinsed, light seems brighter, air feels newly breathable, and your body becomes an instrument tuned to their frequency.
Real love disorders the eat boundaries between longing and annihilation, makes surrender feel ecstatic, introduces a sweetness so extreme it begins to resemble danger. You understand why poets keep reaching for death language when they speak of devotion. There is something profound in the desire that wants to end the separateness, and the psyche can barely distinguish between union and obliteration at that intensity.
@BoCamaro @JJNHLNFLetc Mere Christianity by CS Lewis has a great section on the significance of Jesus needing to die for our sins. It was really eye opening!
@SkotiVi@9mmsmg her reaction makes a point of how insane it is for a situation like this to occur and people aren’t taking extreme measures immediately. she’s flabbergasted
the single greatest thing you can do for your sanity is to take life seriously. we live in a profoundly irony-poisoned society and you cut off 1/100th of what life can offer you by being a goofball. the jester may be near the king but he does not sit at the hand of the father