What is this thing called love that makes me burn? Is it a burn? Like waves ebbing over the chest, or as if the cavities of the heart no longer pumped blood but some bitter and acrid sewage; static, stagnant, stinking filth. And yet how it longs – how the dikes of the heart overflow and pour raging rapids into the stomach, creeping into my entire being as easily as water runs down a gutter. Apart of the liquids in my veins, is there some part of which I can say, this is pure? For neither in my hands any the less to tingle; perhaps only the extremities of my feet, like the tips of sterile mountains stabbing at the gaping blue sky, capped with cold, remain untouched.

But even then, like lightning striking a peak, when I see others holding hands, embracing each other amorously. I cannot stand their happiness – a happiness that is always greater than my own, even when I am with the one I love, the passing object of my desire. Life, to me, that is, the life of other people, is a parade of lovers, a parade down the hallways holding hands, and has always been from the beginnings of those star-struck matches (ill-fated) in middle school, whereon I gazed but took no part, to the ends of time and pale skeletal hands, clasping each other even unto death shall you part.

Death is the thing – when the final eyes close, when the final darkness comes on, which is not a darkness of the eyes, but a darkness (we might as well think) of the ears for not seeing, of the heart for not hearing, of the fingers for not smelling – when this sensory deprivation encloses me, I shall be alone. Will a spark of love, even from the Platonic fire, encase my colding body, my soul freezing in the exhalation of collapsed lungs and escaping like some foul odor from the dirt? I will rot, I will rot, I will rot, and where will be love then? I want an embrace of sex which is death.

But even when I’m kneeling on my knees, or even when I’m kissing ripe, young lips, I can’t escape the passage of time, the passage of a transitory moment, and I only want to hold in my arms, clasp onto forever, feel the tingle running in all my body, through all the extremities, like a mountain caught in blazes, a brown and red-burning, earthly sun. And then when that is done, and liquids are being cleaned, and a weariness overtakes the body, that little death should be a death held with the other in clasping arms. Bones and sinew and muscle joining each other, the mutual admiration of beauty in reciprocal faces, almost as if we were a tesselation, a pattern stretching off into eternity, completing and extending each other indefinitely. Then there would be the intercourse of words, and then love would be called, recalled, and we would speak of it like observers of uncharted territory, comparing measurements, drawing figures, arguing, sometimes, about a position or most rational explanation, but always extending our hold, always claiming more for the Kingdom of Life, planting flags, erecting walls, establishing laws.

How glorious, for instance, traveling through Antarctica, to spend the day in frigid winds and endless cold-stretching fields of white, only upon the nights to sojourn together in a red-walled tent and to sleep in the same sleeping bag, a candle flicker for light, the embrace against the cold of one warm chest upon another, and the murmur of lips on the lover’s neck, fading and strengthening into the penetration of bodies, heightened ecstasy of confined movement, until you can feel something of the other person entering your being?

But my loves are so transitory. They walk in and out of my life like men walk into and out of a bathroom, sometimes without even pausing to wash their hands, doubtless forgetting to flush the toilet. And thus this gunk within me, this foul corruption of raw sewage, this raw air that bubbles in my boiling veins, flowing all to my extremities, even like vats of boiling laundry. And when I see others, I can see only my conception, only the perfect love that they enjoy, and only stretching white horizons. Then I envy them. How is that for every attempt on my apart, I cannot ever mount the summit? And yet there they are, gazing down from the top, happily among frosted peaks, and planting flags!