Winning

Love is fierce, a fire. Can you feel it burning you?

The dictionary tells me that love is;

a strong feeling of affection for another person; a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend; a person toward whom love is felt; beloved person; sweetheart.

Popularised and sellable, they think it's little heart shaped chocolates, delicate pink tissue, smooth bodies that brush in summer nights, mewls of delight.

This is very nice, but it is a little less than half of the story. I know that love is a verb. I know that love is wild, frightening and that it will not stop.

I know that love is sacrifice too. Do you know that friends and cousins no longer speak to me because of the way that I love you?

You left me an orphan with no siblings. Because neither our colour nor our god are yours. You pushed us out of the circle of your heart. Less than human - it suited you for us to die. Horror and panic and smoke and ashes.

It has taken my everything to love you. Everything screams indignation, but my passion brings submission. Everything must give way to this. Everything must lie down at the feet of my loving purpose.

It has not always been like this. How I have dreamed...your still-warm blood on my hands! I have dreamed of taking an axe to the back of your head. With all my might.

To take you apart, grind you down, like dust. And to blow you away with a quick, light breath.

To make you crawl and gasp and beg. Laughter rolling out with the bitter foam of my mouth. Without mercy, I would be cat-like and you, my pathetic tortured little thing.

You are many, and your sins are legion. It would call for more than I possess. I'd have to recruit, indoctrinate and train.

Lost in my mind, I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the city dismantling itself, shattering itself brick by brick. I heard the shots and the shouts followed by the alarming silences. I thought I heard the score, how it would build and rise.

Such things do grow. To avenge, to restore balance and justice – the most fertile of quests. The sprawling of violence up from the ground into relentless brambles.

You thought you'd put your schemes in the holes shot in us, thought you'd plant them there. Didn't you? 

But I stop you in your tracks.

When I love you, you become mine. I am yours. We are One. I hold you in my heart and you cannot get away. There is none so dogged as a wild-with-grief lover.

It means that I get up when I would rather lie on the floor waiting to die. It means I get up and I comb my hair. I get up and I scald my tongue on black coffee, and I sit there, and I think about you. I am like a silly young girl dreaming of her wedding day.

All day I wait for you, and when I am sick with waiting, I go out into the streets. Careful that I may miss you, and cautious that I may miss your mother or brother, I look into the eyes of all I pass, ready with the salve I keep. Ready to pour it out on all who may ask, all who may need it.

I am a dreamer unhinged. Just grasp you and hold you in the crook of my arm! Just to love your dying bodies, the wounds and cavities, the blood and the lolling of your injured heads.

At every corner they are fighting. Fighting and losing; limbs lost, minds lost. Losing and losing again.

Loving you is not sweet, not at first. It is hard and coarse and it writhes, it grits and it gripes. It smoulders and churns. But it is tender.

To tenderize is to beat and pound and whack. The butcher takes his time and whack! his beating releases whack! the depth of flavour whack! from the cold lump of flesh. It feels like death.

So you see, my beloved, I am fighting too. To remove the bitter bread from the mouths of the babies, to remove the gall stones that would break their little teeth.

I am not giving in, stopping, shutting down or stilting. I am keeping on, grasping, toiling battling and gritting. And in this way, I am winning.