“I’ll eat you up!” my grandmother would cry. “I’ll have you on toast! You’ll be the jam!”
She frightened me, this woman who raised me, and not only because she wanted to consume whoever and whatever she loved, but because from the beginning I knew we were the same: everything we felt, we felt furiously.
Our house itself was mad. She loved cats, so we had seventeen. She loved Chanel No. 5, she loved dark red, she loved steak and Lindt bittersweet chocolate—she loved these all so well that she never considered other scents or colors or flavors; it was clear that she would drown herself in these. When she bought another kind of chocolate, it was only to make sure that it was less desirable. The pleasure of her brief infidelity was that it reconfirmed her passion for Lindt bittersweet.
Raised by such a woman, I was not taught to temper my nature; I succumbed to my own furious loves and went out into the world to follow them. But I always came back; I couldn’t stay away from my grandmother for long, and I’d pick her up to hug her. She hated that; she’d kick and I liked to feel her kicking.
Passion isn’t tender; it’s not kind, unless kindness is bait: Passion can appear kind for as long as it takes to ensnare its object. Those of us at the mercy of a passionate nature are children of Siva, a Hindu god with four arms, wrapped in tiger skin, mounted on a bull: god of paradox, savior of those he doesn’t annihilate, chief among vampires.
The vampire is our mascot and our caution: lustful monster, creature who loves life too much to bear to part with it, who loves it so foolishly that he ends up damned to eternal unlife, to unslakable thirst. Those afflicted by passion always want to eat or drink up the object of their desire, because what—who—they love (or hate) inspires such intensity of feeling, they are afraid it will obliterate them. It’s eat or be eaten.
My grandmother and I made ourselves sick on Lindt bittersweet chocolate, on that and on other loves.