“We looked at each other, afraid to speak, afraid to load our feelings into words in case the words cracked and split. I pinned my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached.”
What is it about me that people find me so easy to let go of. What is it about me, in that people can just decide they want to leave, and then they leave. How do people you love just decide you can’t possibly be loved back.
Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is the hole. When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. […] Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.
