I love you.
Love, the second word in the sentence, is the verb and acts by joining the two pronouns, pro-lovers, you and I. Love melts “you” into “I” or is it just grammar that bends “I” into “you,” just that old subject to object-of-the-verb magic? Love dissolves disbelief, since it defies credulity. Love establishes an impossible, enduring, tender, spidery bridge between us, two poor pronouns. You and I are simple, one-syllable words, you and I need love.
“We do not see what we love, but we love in the hope of confirming the illusion that we are indeed seeing anything at all.” (Paul de Man)
“Stereotype/Monotype/Blood type/Are you my type?” (Vernon Reid)
Paige shuffled the hearts and named each of them, and while she did, forced herself to remember him and herself with as much detail and vividness as she could bear. It’s often hard to bear your own history. A languid heaviness coursed through her and then settled like a stone in her stomach.
“I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with him. The cars and trucks rumbling and tearing beneath us were terrifying. He thought it was weird that I didn’t find any security in the fact that there was something solid under our feet. He held my hand, the way I hold this heart. Later, we went for Indian food. It was the first time I ever ate it. Then we went back to my place and made love for the first time, too. He stroked the insides of my thighs.”
“Love u more than I did when u were mine.” (Prince)
“The heart you betrayed,/ the heart you lost,/ see in this hour/ what a heart it was.” (Bellini, Norma)
Dearest,
I’m afraid now too, though I’m not actually walking over a bridge. There isn’t anything beneath my feet. I can’t breathe or yawn or laugh or smile or cook or move or run or jump or stand or sit. I am restless. Bedeviled angel, sweet oxymoron, I ask questions you can’t possibly answer. I’m not reasonable, absolutely not, why should I be, why should you? Really, I only have questions and you are a question to me, you are the question. I ask myself—you—what is it you want and what is it I want. Our wanting isn’t going to be enough, though it is for now, wanting you is enough now. I can’t live without you. See how you have destroyed me?
“For love—I would/ split open your head and put/ a candle in/ behind the eyes.” (Robert Creeley)
Even so, or even more, I love you.
“You” is, you are, the last word, the last word and the first one too. In “you” there are two letters more than “I”—the difference is a diphthong, two vowels to create one sound—ooh, you-ooh. The vowels demand each other, they nestle together to make their sound.
Dearest,
My love clings to you. It is silent and dark, hidden from everyone else but you. Love is silent, sex is noisy. To write love, that’s what I really want, and to write it to you must be finding silence also. Soundlessly, I’d put everything into words, and though the words are not actually love but how love would speak if it could—if my heart could talk—the words would make no sound. Yet, through my desire, with my will, they would strike a chord inside you. My words would creep and slither into you, if I had my way, and I want my way with you, and words once inert on paper would suddenly wing through the air like missiles. Silly or profound, they would fly into you, and you would embrace them or, more perfectly, they would embrace you. You would be entered, love, you would be my precious entrance to love and also my final destination, eternal enchantment.
“What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:/ Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid./ Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,/ Shall I reproach you dead?” (Paul Verlaine)
Paige drank green tea and wondered what had happened to him, the lanky, green-eyed young man who hated himself, who said, I don’t know why you like me. She hadn’t liked him but had loved something about him.
“He was living on West Fourth Street and had been suicidal for years. He told everybody his brother was a movie star, and that was true. His room was in the back of a store and on the floor was a single mattress. The mattress looked like an unopened envelope. He said he had not made love in three years, and after he came, he cried, and the next day he hovered in a doorway, there was a violet gash on his neck. Then he disappeared forever.”
Obliviously, I love you.
She was becoming stiff and rose from the table, and walked from room to room, imagining she was a ferocious animal. Paige paced back and forth, back and forth, not sleek as a tiger or cunning as a fox but on the prowl. She felt a little hungry.
“Even today love, too, is in essence as animal as it ever was.” (Freud)
Paige took up the scissors again. Love, she considered with affection, should be generous, at the very least it should appear to be. She smiled absentmindedly as she cut more hearts, attempting to keep them attached like a chain of paper dolls. Was she fashioning love? Wasn’t the memory better than the love? The shapes grew progressively more uneven and awkward.
“You planted yourself in my garden, taking up room, then, oh, you grew, you became a weed, you were so tall, with such nerve. Your satin trousers and you were much too sleek. I tried to escape, but you insisted. You kept on insisting, about what, toward what end, I can’t remember. I wish flowers had never been looked at before. When we stood up, I felt taller, as tall as you, no, taller. You were awkward, but I remember all your questions.”
Awkwardly, I love you.
Dearest,
I can still say it, common as it is, common as mud and as thick and undecipherable. In my dreams I cleave to you, I hold you, your body bent to mine, your body reminding me of someone else who is no longer here to love me, but then that’s love, one body replaces another. I don’t mean that, not just any other, yours, only you. And only you understand me, the me who loves you. You and I make meaning together, that’s how love is, what love is—meaning. Meaning I love you. Meaning, I love you. “I love you” means I won’t listen to reason.
“Everybody has a different idea of love. One girl I knew said, ‘I knew he loved me when he didn’t come in my mouth.’” (Andy Warhol)
Paige thought about coloring the hearts and affixing titles to them. I’m glad no one can see me, she thought, and hummed aloud: I’m a little teapot, lift me up, pour me out. I’m a common heart, a commoner, a common metaphor, a cup of tea, a loaf of bread, a bouquet of posies. I am also beside myself. Hush, Paige admonished, be still, useless heart. Then she uncorked a bottle of red wine.
Commonly, I love you.
Since childhood, Paige had read poets and listened to the music of composers and songwriters who ordinarily took love as their subject. It made sense because love is mute, nearly unspeakable, so it needs a voice; still, it’s impossible to give it fully or sufficiently. So, no one can say enough about love or for it, and it cannot be encompassed or conquered, since it’s abstract, constantly inconsistent, outrageously ineffable, obdurate, and evasive. Therefore, Love endures as a subject worth taking up.
Paige allowed these sentiments and others entry, yet feared that whatever she had experienced and read, the cautionary tales she imbibed, couldn’t protect her. She hoped, desperately, to invest in knowledge and gain strength for the lovesick nights, for those raw, endless hours that robbed her blind and stole her reason.
“The night murmurs/Its thousand loves/ And false counsels/ To soften and seduce the heart.” (Puccini, Tosca)
“There was a time when I believed your love belonged to me/ Now I find that you’re shackled to a memory/… How can I free your doubtful mind?/ And melt your cold, cold heart.” (Hank Williams)
Blindly, I love you.
Dearest,
Even when my eyes hurt and everything’s blurred, I keep writing and reading. Weak eyes still love stories. Remember when you said I’m full of stories. You are too. Isn’t this how you seduced me? Wasn’t it your story, how you told it, how I sank into it, submitted, and collapsed into the superb rendition of your life—into you? I thought I saw you in your story. And isn’t this how I s
educed you? It wasn’t my beauty, was it? It wasn’t my youth, was it? I think it was my story, one word after another after another, circling around you, gathering you to me. My lines roped you in, the way yours did me, our lines -– to continue this pathetic figure of speech—tangled, and we became one story. I have a French friend who always said about her love affairs, I’m having a little story with him. With words like sticky plums, I drew you close.
My grip, on you, on my own tales, is sometimes tenuous. I might slip, but I always love you.
Paige drank the wine, but she barely tasted it, she was transfixed. In her red bathrobe she looked comical, like a giant valentine. From time to time she glanced at the clock on the wall, but she wasn’t sure what time it was. Every month the clock needed a new battery, but she forgot to change it. It was good that actual hearts didn’t have batteries to be changed or recharged. Except there were pacemakers. Maybe that’s why she felt run down, her heart was mimicking a machine. Paige stacked the paper hearts like honeyed pancakes.
Sweetly, I love you.
“She was so much in love, she wanted to make love all the time. He was away. She left their house and walked to a canal and saw a man standing on a bridge. She liked him, and it was easy to make love. Her exciting, grand passion threatened to make negligible any differences between one man and another. And, also, her love made her expansive, bigger than she was. She abandoned herself to the threat of self-annihilation—that’s what love is—and spent the afternoon with the stranger. There was no restraint, she gave him everything he wanted, without regret. He gave her his address, and she tore it up later.”
“Such wayward ways hath Love, that most part in discord/ Our wills do stand, whereby our hearts seldom do accord.” (Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey)
Discordantly, I love you.
You are everything. “You” is everything to the sentence, I love you, for without “you,” could “I” love?
Dearest,
It‘s strange to write “I love you.” I don’t mean to you, what’s strange is to write it, to commit it to paper or the screen. I don’t mean that it could be anyone but you when I write, I love you. Only you could be the you that I love. That’s obvious. Isn’t it obvious that I love you, and that, without you, I cannot love. You alone will see where I’m leading, where my thought carries me, because my thought carries me to you.
“The air is fragrant and oddly pure this morning. It wafts into my room and reminds me of days when I played for hours in the forest down the road, our jungle, or maybe it was next to the house then, back then. I can’t remember. I remember how in the winter the pond would freeze over and all of us kids would ice skate, our hands tucked into our sleeves or sheltered safely in woolen mittens. Mittens are for little creatures who need shelter all the time. With mittens we are small animals with paws. The boys I played with—were you one of them? Even then? Steve, Ronnie, Jerry. They were always around the house. Jerry was dark and round. Ronnie, tall and blond, angular and angry, a bad boy. He became a lawyer. Steve stood apart and sulked. I wonder what happened to him.”
Abruptly Paige jumped up from the table. At the sink she poured out the dregs of the tea. It was late, and the city was quiet, sleeping. Does a city sleep when it can’t close its eyes? Isn’t everyone wrong about something like love?
Above her, in the upstairs apartment, a man strode heavily across the floor, from the refrigerator to the toilet, to the bed or in a different order. He stomped around like an enraged elephant, like a lover floundering from betrayal.
Love is not silent, love is loud and violent and vicious with a lovely, unsatisfactory language entangled on a wet tongue that entices. Paige danced around the kitchen, one hand gently patting her stomach.
“I danced on ‘Shop Around’/ but never the flip side/ ‘Who’s Lovin’ You’/ boppin’ was safer than grindin’/ (which is why you should not come around)” (Thulani Davis)
The language of and for love explains and isn’t explanatory enough. If it’s not learned well or early, but if one is a quick study, one could, with diligence, pick it up later. Paige wondered: Is psychoanalysis the way to learn to love later?
“The analyst’s couch is the only place where the social contract explicitly authorizes a search for love—albeit a private one.” (Julia Kristeva)
Childishly, I love you.
Dearest,
I don’t want to love you badly. It’s intangible, I suppose, how to love, but since it resides in language and the language of the body—can touch be taught?—it has a presence and effects, and it also exists with words. Love is a grammar, a style, replete with physical gestures and utterances and yellow marks flashing on gray-green computer screens. What if my hard drive crashes? What if you stop loving me? What if I stop loving you? What then? What words would ever be enough?
“…Once you see emotions from a certain angle, you can never think of them as real again. That’s what more or less has happened to me. I don’t really know if I was ever capable of love, but after the 60s, I never thought in terms of ‘love’ again.” (Andy Warhol)
Dearest,
I hate this something you and I didn’t name. It’s gone out of control. With time, with time weighing us down, with no time to think about the future, with every fear about time passing—when will love come?—we grab love and hold it tight. Now we have it, now we have it, here it is, do you see it? I give it to you. I will forget everything else to love you.
“Let us forget the whole world!/ For you alone, dearest, I long!/ I have a past no more,/ I do not think of the future.” (Verdi, Don Carlos)
“Love is begot by fancy, bred by ignorance, by expectation fed,
Destroyed by knowledge, and, at best,/Lost in the moment ’tis
possessed.” (George Granville, Baron Lansdowne)
Impossibly, I love you.
“Love incapacitates me, my language is never enough. The language is the matter, language is matter, it matters, it doesn’t matter, we matter, we are matter, you and I are the matter, the matter of love, the stuff of it, you and I. We are not enough, neither is love, there’s no sense to it, it doesn’t make sense to you or me that this is what we are in, love, a state of temporary grace with each other. It doesn’t make sense, it’s not sound. It is a sound. It’s your voice.”
Dearest,
You wanted to know, when you phoned (I love the sound of your voice) what was on my mind. Just as you called I was thinking (I had pushed you out of my mind in order to think), Some days it doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Then the telephone rang. Anyway it’s Sunday, and I was thinking of Lewis Carroll and Edith Wharton, who wrote in bed, enviable position, with a board on her lap, traveling or at home, every morning. As she finished a page, she let it drop to the floor, to be scooped up later by her secretary who typed it. Lewis Carroll (I don’t know where he wrote) and Wharton, it was something about her love letters to Morton Fullerton, and Carroll’s love of Alice, his desire for young girls. Was his sense of the absurd best exemplified by the ludicrous position he fell into, his love for such a small being. How crazy it must have felt to him, spending Sundays with Alice, bending down to hear her speak all day long, looming over the tiny object of his illicit affections. Even stranger to him must have been his wild, prohibited longing, if he actually felt it, to insert his penis into that girl’s vagina. He must have felt so small and so big, and there it was, the topsy-turviness of his intimate world which he then concocted into words, and with words published (in the old sense), though no one knew, or wrote his body, I think, and its occupying desires. Alice had to become small to become big. Carroll had no sense of scale, did he, no proportion? Did he ever tell Alice, I love you? Did Lewis Carroll love Alice the way I love you or very differently? Is love the same for everyone, from its beginning to its end? If I wrote to you the way Wharton wrote her lover, would you like it? Please tell me, I want to give you what you want, I want to be everything you want me to be.
Now I’m crimson. I don’t want to f
eel like this, but I can’t help it, my words stall on my tongue, they won’t come, and then they can’t stop coming.
“I’m so afraid that the treasures I long to unpack for you, that have come to me in magic ships from enchanted islands, are only, to you, the old familiar red calico & beads of the clever trader….Well! and if you do? It’s your loss, after all!” (Edith Wharton, to Morton Fullerton)
Alone with longing, Paige verged toward alienation, like a spectator in her own amorous theater, where she could no longer play the ingenue. Now the paper hearts were actors, and some had important roles and others minor parts, just a line or two appended to a sexy action. Some characters were walk-ons, others appeared as comic relief.
Still, Paige fell in love, and, when she fell, plummeted into a lavish set of conventions. The modes were intractable and not her own, yet sensation maintained that her love was unique. Paige was capable of holding contradictory ideas and emotions, and, as ridiculous as it all was, she bore the irony. People bore it all the time, and some were so experienced in love’s disappointments, they had discarded or discredited it. But Paige couldn’t let it go, and, for its part, love wouldn’t leave her alone.
Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;/My fingers ache, my lips are dry;/
Oh! if you felt the pain I feel!/But oh, who ever felt as I!” (Sappho)
Ironically, I love you.
Dearest,
Your love proposes and then marries me to a different idea of me, a new identity with its own poetic license, so now I’m different from myself but joined with your self, and you are different from yourself, at least from the way you have been, and the way your life has gone, and our love is the best difference that you and I will ever experience. Isn’t it? Won’t our love mark, cloud, inflect, protect, deform, consume, and subsume us? Won’t it cast shadow or sunlight over all other experience? Isn’t love the limit? Or, more gravely, like death, an inconsiderate end parenthesis.
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