What Is Love
By: Patrick M. Ohana
Tags: Pain, Love, Prose, Meaning, Suffering

What Is Love

Picture by Nick Youngson (CC BY-SA 3.0) on Picpedia

It would be easier to describe what is life, even what is death, than what is love, yet this is the question, perhaps the tallest one. How tall is it? you may ask. All the way to the Moon, and who knows, maybe all the way to the heart of the Sun where any love would disintegrate into ashes and eventually some atoms of hydrogen.

Love could probably survive on the Moon with the right protection from space and all its misadventures, but on, let alone, within the Sun, love will be doomed to a hellish end. Methinks that all love ends in the Sun. It might start on the Moon and, of course, Earth, but the Sun is its last destination. The Sun is where love goes to die.

But how would I know such a terrible thing? Am I just attempting to be poetic for those who like that sort of thing? Am I exaggerating too much? Have I gone insane? It may be all of the above. Yet, I submit that I haven’t gone mad just yet. There are a few more things to say, I mean, type. My fingers refuse to stop. My mind seems to be reeling from unrequited love as well as love already lost to the Sun.

There’s no muse in this one. Well, I just mentioned her and she’s in it. I’ll let her fly above me in her spacesuit. She can’t do much from within it. But you can still see her beauty. It can penetrate any known material. Her love may be the only love that doesn’t die in the Sun. Her love always dies on the Moon. I prefer mine to die in the Sun like everyone else’s. No matter how special is one’s love, the Sun should be its last destination. Dust to Sun is the correct phrase. Dust to dust only occurs on the Moon.

I hate the Moon. I didn’t before but now I do. Fuck the Moon, that cold sphere of hills of dust and meteorite holes! Cheese, my ass! The Moon is made of ancient demise, prehistoric death, only serving Earth to control its blue waters, since whatever the Moon has wouldn’t nourish even a bacterium. Fuck the Moon, again! I hope that it leaves one day like in Space: 1999. The Moon is more overrated than Facebook and Twitter combined. Fuck them too! What a bunch of criminals in red suits. Even blue suits would look red on them.

Back to love, the feeling that killed so many men and women; so many hearts and minds gone forever because of love. Yet we love love. We adore it. Love, love, love! It’s everywhere. We even put it in the air. But as I mentioned elsewhere, we have yet to invent a love detector. Love consumes the soul, in a good way but it can hurt, a lot, but not as much as a kidney stone, or giving birth I was told and read. Except for these two (and other bodily stones), love is the worst. Of course, I’m not trying to diminish any of the other diseases and malaises. But this is not a list of horrors. It’s a poetic attempt to showcase the case against or for love. Let’s begin! What am I saying? That was it.

“Come on, M! You’ve lost it again.”

What do you mean? lowly narrator.

“You didn’t finish the story. You’ve skipped perhaps the best part.”

Who’d care? As far as they know, that was it. It’s a decent ending, maybe even better. This is not Shakespeare. It’s a dying poet. Everyone starts dying at 50. And if you’re lucky, you get to 60 to brag about it. I’m stuck in the middle but this is not the Twilight Zone. Where’s Rod Serling? They could bring him back for this one. It would be poetic and then some. It’s true that the last part is interesting and has some sex.

“I told you so.”

You just did, again. What a prick of a narrator! Take a hike for a while. I’ll do the narrating for this one. Maybe you can also go to the Moon. You could even send me pictures of my muse pretending to be alive. There’s too much dust for life. Humans don’t live underground under “normal” conditions. We need the sky and the Sun, and the freaking Moon. What a splendid satellite you are! You reek of coldness. The cheese has dried up. Yeah, the dust is cheese. We could live on it. Maybe they’ll even have some lactose-free. Anyways, back to love.

Love hurts too much. It doesn’t stop. It’s like a freaking kid. Love, love, love! It doesn’t stop unless you get pussy. I mean a woman, of course, and preferably the one you love. I’m not going to discuss the prick because we’re not in speaking terms. What did you expect from a prick? Really? Anything long and dangling can only be of no good. Well, of course, not everyone. But I’m taking some liberties. This is still fiction told as if it was not. I only write fiction, and when it’s not, it becomes an agent, and only some will like it and others will not. Thus, I only write fiction that may appear as if it was reality. Well, I try. Love, as you know, is a big word. Very big! Very big! I’m sorry but my muse is at it again.

“You just told them about me. Did you lose your loving head?” my dear muse asked.

They already knew about you living on the Moon.

“No! my love! You also told them about Prague. Pretty Prague, you call her. I agree. She’s even beautiful,” my dear muse replied.

Yes. But that was in another story that most of them haven’t read. Just the pricks, of course. All my best readers are meanings of life, you know, women. That blessed species of Aphrodites and all the other readers, some seem to be good men. Of my muse there’s only one. All the blood in my heart is filled with her love. I’m a sinking ship. I feel heavy. Luckily there’s God’s plant to calm the love tsunami and make it more manageable. Yet, when I type these words, it acts up again. Words also carry love, and hate, of course. Love is a multifaceted beast. It’s hard to nail it even when you’re on top. You learn how to love it until she screams your name in her dreams. Love has to be nourished with love. It’s its only food. Everything else is a toxin which eventually sinks the ship, or breaks your back. Whatever!

Love is too complicated for words. There are a few things like that which cannot be explained with words. Pain is another one. No matter what fucking scale they used, it stopped at 10 and I was feeling 20. The other important one is suffering. It’s connected to pain but it’s not the same. There is suffering with no measurable pain. There is pain with no suffering. But love is the topic here, not those other constants of life, those two pricks. Every calamity is a prick and all pricks know it at some point in their life. But the poor woman waiting for that awakening is stuck and often cannot do anything feasible about it. Her life has been marked for not enough love. That’s what destroys most marriages. Love has to overflow. Here I am preaching. But I’m not a poet here. I’m just trying to convey some thoughts that don’t require much thought. It’s quite interesting when it works.

I think that I’ll end about here. Love may be unknowable. Maybe it’s another particle in the subatomic realm of persistence. We could perhaps detect it. But no one is looking for love. I’ve written before about it. It’s an ongoing discussion. I think that I’m winning but the muse may change things. She’s unpredictable at times. I have to write her something in French. It’s her favourite language. I prefer the sound of Portuguese followed by Italian and only then French, and I don’t speak my favourite two. I just love the sound of each, its musicality. And while English is not in the list, it has Shakespeare and thus is automatically added to the top. Case closed! Don’t even try to open it! You’ll lose every time. Shakespeare is the God of Literature. You can’t go anywhere beyond, except perhaps in a dream. Big deal! Yeah, I want to dream tonight at around 4 a.m. that I’m better than the Bard. Even in a dream I couldn’t do it. My consciousness will hunt my unconscious until it’s tamed like a shrew (only for Shakespeare) or a good man. Good luck!

Patrick M. Ohana