I make an art of falling in love.

To pierce the drab monotony of a plastic life and fecundate it with the illusion of purpose or progress! - that is the role of art and the role of love. It is the same. The immutable and absolute immersion in an exterior life, all for itself; the radiant, thronging, cheering and triumphant crowds of memories bursting forth as though crying 'Liberty!' in the face of some tyrant; the intermingling of dreams as though meeting for the first time! To fall in love is to fall into art, I think.

And yet, in spite of the centuries of poems begging for love to please indefinitely, it does not. As it withers, so art itches in between our bones, a perpetual arthritis of the soul. We cherish the suffering art brings us, for it is from suffering that we yearn and from yearning that we fool ourselves. To love is to deify the putrid cadaver of what was lost before it was had. To love art is to deify our Selves, for it is that yearning, borne of suffering the weight of imagination, which springs from us and paints us into that which we see, or feel. Oh, for that imperishable burden to live, to, see, to think, to feel, to skulk home with a can of cider at three in the morning!

Finding art and love irreconcilable, I decided to make one of the other. My love would be Romantic with a capital 'R'; it would exist in thoughts, sheer thoughts bursting at the seams with symbols and meanings only I could ever hope to understand. It would be the Thing above all Things, Sartre's Nauseating roman. My love would thrive on its own negation, and I would seek it everywhere.

And so it is that I find myself staring hopelessly into the abyss. She sits and smiles, smiles and sits as I rise manfully from the slumber of a thousand years of inertia and self-servitude and tear from her blissful presence the cloaked figures of a thousand suitors. From the Heavens, from across the seas I cannot see; from the ditches, from upon the roaring hills, a gargantuan orchestra spills a symphony of all that I never was into a weeping, sighing valley. The wind rips through the endless darkness about me, grips me by the skin, yet on I walk, through my very own symphony and her! Her, above, below, all around -who cares? My parched and stinging lips traipse through a million memories in search of hers and, finding but a nervous smile, quench themselves with the tears of thoughts I have never really had.

I stare hopelessly into the abyss, as she smiles at me in a not unfriendly way.