writing about love
It's like that one joke. A physicist, a chemist, and a mathematician are all staying in a hotel, when a fire sparks in each of their rooms. The physicist and the chemist both manage to put the fire out, but the mathematician, upon seeing that there is a solution to the problem, falls back asleep.
Sometimes I feel like the punchline to the joke, even though I'm the one telling it. And you, you're the one listening, so we both end up laughing together.
But I'm always waking up to see fires lighting up in the bathroom. And so I put pen to paper, trying to reconfigure the formula for this numerical sequence, so that the sum is always defined for every limit that n approaches, even though I'm never going to utilize this in any real world application.
You don't like math. Okay. How else can I put this.
Plato theorized in his allegory of the Cave that in the world around us, we only see the imperfect shadows of the perfect Forms in which ideas exist. Chair as it exists before us will never live up to chair as it exists in our mind.
I've been thinking, though, that my Platonic idea of you might be the version that's less perfect. And so there are two of you at war with each other: the one that exists in my mind, and the one who keeps me warm at night. The demon, dragging me to Hell, dragging me into the chaos and joy and despair of love, and the human, holding me steady as my heart beats too quickly and threatens to drown out the words struggling to escape from my mouth.
It's because I always assume the worst and prepare myself for it, that the ones closest to me become monsters in my mind. So these letters to the ether are a way to reconcile the dark with the light, madness with reality, and ultimately the moon with the sun.
Maybe I can put it more clearly.
People always seem more ready to choose the gun over the heart. So my entire life I've loved too hard, and had to swallow the truth or risk facing down a bullet. You're the first who hasn't been so quick to raise the gun.
Recently I wrote a poem titled Different Ways to Say "I Love You," but I'm keeping that one to myself for now. I'm not going to put words into your mouth.
You'll say what you need to. You'll pull the trigger if the time is ever right, or maybe I will. For now, I fall asleep with the fire burning in the bathroom, facing the shadows that the dancing flames make on the walls.