What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Post midnight.
We stumble through the door. I reach into the kitchen for a draught of water. I bring you a glass. Red wine is dancing within the recesses of your circulatory system. You always drink more hastily than I, so I am always mildly inebriated while you veer towards intoxication.
I return the glass to the kitchen counter. I place an empty bottle under the RO filter. I cap it when it’s full and take it to the bedroom, along with my phone, both of which I place beside my side of the bed.
I move towards the sofa and begin to unfurl my sari. I unhook my blouse and place both items of clothing in an untidy pile. I reach into your cupboard and pull out a T-shirt. After having clothed myself, I walk into the bathroom, lean over the sink, remove the bindi from my forehead and place it on the mirror frame, in company with the other bindis from previous occasions. I wash and dry my face, and then I lie on your bed and draw the sheet over me.
Three months into the New Year and it seems as though winter has renewed its lease. The nights are distinctly chilly when they ought to be balmy. Which means there is no need for the respite offered by a whirring fan.
I pick up my phone and look for the Shortyz app. I pull out the LA Times Crossword and start to decode the clues while anticipating your arrival.
Half-way into my crossword, you enter the bedroom, shut the door behind you, undress, put on your night clothes, move towards the bathroom, brush your teeth, return towards the bed, turn off the lights, and crawl in.
I turn off my phone and place it near the water bottle. I move towards you. I have to make an effort since you’ve veered closer towards the edge of your corner. Foreseeing your accusation the next morning implying it was I who cornered you, relegating you to a small fraction of the surface area of the bed, I urge you to move closer to the centre. In fact, playfully, I physically move you closer to what I consider to be the bridge3 between our individual sides;
I tug at your hips with my fingers, compelling you to move closer.
Playful laughter.
‘I don’t want you accosting me tomorrow.’
‘For what?’
‘For pushing you to the corner.’
‘Now kiss me,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Because … Because you love me.’
‘How can you assume that?’ you ask.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That I love you? How can you just assume?
‘Really?’
‘After five … well, almost six years of our being together, you’re still not convinced you love me?’
‘I may. Or may not. But how can you just assume I do?’
‘It’s not an assumption. It’s based on facts. You yourself have said that you do … that you love me. About four or five times since we met. To my face.’
‘How long ago was the last time?’ you ask.
‘Um. Maybe in July? In Paris? Or maybe last October? In any case, saying you do or not saying you do … it doesn’t mean anything. I used to be with someone who told me everyday for six years that he loved me, and when push came to shove, I realised that he didn’t after all … And, hello, you’re the one who pursued me in the first place!’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yes, you’re the one who urged me to come to Delhi,’ I remind you.
‘What was the context?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I don’t see why my telling you to come was important in any way. You came here to work.’
You entwine your legs with mine and draw me closer to you.
‘I’m not talking about the time I moved to Delhi. I’m talking about the first time I came to see you in Delhi,’ I say.
Long strokes along the length of my back.
‘When was that?’
‘August 2008? Just a few days after we met. We met on the 2nd.’
Strokes continue. I start to melt.
‘You’re a pretty girl. I’m sure I would have told anyone in your place to come to Delhi.’
You do a mock imitation of a Casanova-like character.
‘Oh. I see. I thought I was—’
‘Special?’
‘No. Different.’
Your fingers move along the surface of my thighs. So close—
‘Wow. That changes everything. I was reading it all wrong.
So you don’t love me!’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘It’s not that I’m not certain. I just can’t commit to it the way you do. Are you going to start crying and get all hysterical?’
‘No. I’m not. Or I don’t intend to. I am crying. But that’s because I feel—’
‘Hurt?’
‘Betrayed. I don’t understand. What are you afraid of? I mean, it’s not like if you were to declare it, I would beg you to marry me, or have me move in with you. We both know that isn’t going to happen.’
‘But you are secretly looking for some kind of commitment, aren’t you?’
‘How can I possibly ask you to commit to me when I am not sure myself about whether I want to commit to you or not, or if I’m even able to in the first place?’
‘That’s good to know.’
‘So why are you with me then?’ I ask.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It will soon be six years since we met. Why continue this? Why am I here in your bed?’
‘Can you pull my hair?’ you ask.
‘Sure.’
I lean towards you and toss my right leg over your legs and draw you closer to my cunt. I run the fingers of my left hand over your hair and start to pull at small bunches. I can hear you purr under your breath. My lips crouch against your neck.
‘There are different levels to it,’ you say.
‘To what?’
‘To us.’
‘Okay.’
‘On one level there is the warmth and comfort I feel when I’m around you. You have this feminine touch. Then there’s the intellectual connect. We understand each other. I can talk to you about things and you understand. Then there’s our work relationship. We work well together. You help me out with my work. Then there’s this emotional connection. I care about you very deeply. I have very strong feelings for you. You bring out my good side. No one else has done that before. And then there’s the attraction. I am very attracted to you. The thing is … I just feel that with something like love, it is easier to show it than to talk about it.’
‘That’s what I was saying.’
‘I may find it difficult to say it to you. But suppose something were to happen to you, I would be the first person, I would go out of my way to be there for you. I know I don’t do, or haven’t done, as much for you as you have for me. But if you were ever in a situation where everyone else abandoned you, I would still be there. I would fight for you.’
Pause.
‘This is all I want,’ I assert.
‘And what is this?’
‘Home. I want to be home.’
‘And where is home?’ you ask.
‘This. You. Us. This is home. This is what I want.’
As we kiss you confront the wetness of my cheeks and the salt of my tears.
‘Listen. Don’t get emotional. Don’t take what I’m saying seriously. I’m drunk. I’m just babbling. This is all just a babble. I’m not declaring anything. I’m just babbling.’
‘So you don’t mean anything you’re saying?’
‘No … I mean I’m babbling. I’ve no control over what I’m saying. So don’t be waking up tomorrow morning complaining that I offended you.’
‘Okay.’
‘Anyway, this is the kind of conversation we should have when I’m sober,’ you say.
‘But we seldom do …’
‘Anyway. Listen, in the end everything is maya. Everything is impermanence. We don’t really even exist. This thing between us doesn’t really exist either. It’s all maya. If there’s one Hindu principle I subscribe to, it’s maya.’
Seconds later, you nod off to sleep. I kiss you, turn sides so that my back is now against yours, and I masturbate.
Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, refers to the utterance of the words ‘I Love You’ as ‘The Love Cry’. Once the first avowal has been made, ‘I love you’ has no meaning whatever, it merely repeats in an enigmatic code—so blank does it appear—the old message (which may not have been transmitted in these words). I repeat it exclusive of any pertinence, it comes out of the language, it divagates—where? he writes.
Barthes seems to suggest that this love cry is a feverish symptom of the pathological condition of being in love, an unavoidable consequence, an inevitable utterance with all the pathos of a desperate shriek, one that may or may not find resonance with the object of the lover’s desire. It is as though, at the moment of its utterance, language loses its significance and connotes nothing except a longing for the loved one to empathise with the disease that has led to this repeated announcement.
To love, according to Barthes, is a socially irresponsible word which doesn’t even exist in the infinitive except by a meta linguistic artifice, and the continued avowal of this state of being in love is one without nuance, one that suppresses explanations, an exorbitant paradox of language. To say I love you is to proceed as if there were no theatre of speech, he writes, which relegates it to the level of performance. It is: Not a sentence. It does not transmit a meaning, but fastens onto a limit situation, the one where the subject is suspended in a specular relation to the other. According to him, to try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive.
Mid-way through Essays in Love, Alain de Botton’s narrator finds himself in a quandary. It is his girlfriend Chloe’s birthday, and despite his contentment over the gift he bought her, the red cashmere pullover that she’d been dropping hints about wanting, he realises, while wrapping his present and writing out a card that he had still not told her he loves her, despite being aware that he did. Pullovers may be a sign of love between a man and a woman, but we had yet to translate our feelings into language, he says. It was as though the core of our relationship, configured around the word love, was somehow unmentionable, either too evident or too significant to be uttered.
The narrator, in the course of the essay titled ‘Speaking Love’, comes close to Barthes’ proposition, that to write love is to confront the muck of language. He compares love to a species of rare, coloured butterfly, often sighted but never conclusively identified. The other problem in declaring love, according to him, is that the very language of love has been corrupted by overuse.
Words like love or devotion or infatuation were exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, by the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. At the moment when I most wanted language to be original, personal, and completely private, I came up against the irrevocably public nature of emotional communication.
Finally, when he was on the brink of articulating his love cry in the stereotypical mode, he spots a plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe’s elbow and has an epiphany. It suddenly seemed clear that I didn’t love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What is it about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings towards her I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word love, weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to. Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe’s hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marshmallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her. From then on, for the couple, the word love became distinguished and personal. It was a sugary, puffy object a few milimetres in diameter that melts deliciously in the mouth.
My favourite poem by Kamala Das is‘In Love’, from her collection, Summer in Calcutta. With each successive reading of this poem over the many years I have been in love with you, the last six lines increased in resonance. The poem, set in summer’s heat, in the ‘burning mouth of sun, burning in today’s sky’ mirroring her insatiable thirst for her anonymous lover, speaks of the meaninglessness of the utterance of the love cry.
Where is room, excuse or even
Need for love, for, isn’t each
Embrace a complete thing a finished
Jigsaw, when mouth on mouth, I lie,
Ignoring my poor moody mind
While pleasure, with deliberate gaiety
Trumpets harshly into the silence of
The room …
She brings the poem to its exhilarating climax as she speaks about the moonless nights …
… while I walk
The verandah sleepless, a
Million questions awake in
Me, and all about him, and
This skin-communicated
Thing that I dare not yet in
His presence call our love.
There is an element of fear and uncertainty she feels even at the thought of making public the intensity of the passion between her and her lover. The words ‘dare not’ imply a kind of self-imposed directive, a prohibition, and, followed by the chronologically bound ‘yet’, they suggest that the time has not yet arrived for any such affirmation of love. There is even a trace of a threat, as if to admit to such an intense emotion would be to sabotage the affair. I love that she refers to the lover’s ‘presence’, rendering it with philosophical implications such that it isn’t limited to the fact of his being present, but the aura of his presence, as though it is for her a gateway into a private world that is only tangentially attached to the solar system by the existence of the melting sun.
There is a suggestion that perhaps, in due course, she may make an avowal, but now is not the time. For the moment, his mouth on hers is substance enough. I also enjoy the hint of presumption in the last line. She doesn’t hesitate in believing that the skin-communicated thing between her and her lover goes both ways. All the fear she may feel in ‘not yet daring’ gets undercut with the mention of ‘our love’. There seems to be some kind of implicit understanding on the part of both lovers as to what this ‘love’ embodies and the mystery of it makes it distinctive.
Das, rather craftily, confronts the muck of language and writes love, but not by any immediate avowal, rather, through différance, by underscoring the non-verbal dialogue between lovers that occurs sensually, where the skin is the receptor and the communicant, and verbal language is best delayed, and by privileging the written almost-avowal or the promise of avowal over the spoken love cry, and by connoting what their love is not by implying what it currently is, while simultaneously proposing, through her use of the word‘yet’ that the future can negatively or positively destabilise her present notion of what their love signifies.
Speaking of différance, I am tempted to reference this YouTube video in which an interviewer, Amy, asks Derrida, the profound literary theorist, if he could say something about love. The grey-haired, though rather handsome-looking Derrida tries hard to conceal his sense of amazement at the ambiguity of the question. His voice betrays him, though, and he sounds unmistakably annoyed by the myopic expansiveness of the question, which in the original French, was, ‘Ce que vous desirez dire de l’amour’? His first response is confusion, followed by a witty rejoinder, a jeu de mots that serves as an excellent testimony to his entire treatise on différance. He says, ‘L’amour or Le Mort?’ (Love or Death), which, when he enunciates in French, sound alarmingly similar phonetically. The interviewer, whose first language is definitely not French, emphasises she meant l’amour, pas le mort. ‘We’ve heard enough about death,’ she adds. ‘L’amour?’ Derrida asks once again, just to be sure. ‘L’amour,’ she reaffirms. And as he replies, you can see his lips contorting into a slight grin, a consequence of his surprise. ‘I have nothing to say about love,’ he replies assertively in his native French. ‘Nothing …’ he continues somewhat irritably. ‘At least pose a question. I can’t examine “love” just like that,’ he adds, bringing me back to Barthes’ hypothesis that to write love is to confront the muck of language, that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive.
‘You need to pose a question. I’m not capable of talking in generalities about love. I’m not capable. Maybe that’s what you want me to say in front of the camera,’ and as he says so, he looks sideways into the lens and laughs. The interviewer now has no option but to actually pose something resembling a legitimate question. ‘Could you explain why this topic has concerned philosophers for centuries? It’s an important philosophical subject, isn’t it?’
But Derrida is not to be placated. ‘You can’t ask this of me, Amy,’ he says, and then repeats the question so he can hear it aloud once more and comprehend its explosive vastness. Finally, he seems to launch into an answer. ‘That’s how philosophy started,’ he says, but again he stops himself short. ‘No, no. It’s not possible.’ His next statement seems to be made after a lapse, you can tell that there was a cut, a break in the narrative, that the film’s editor left something out. The next frame shows a more apologetic Derrida. ‘I have an empty head on love in general. And as for the reason philosophy has often spoken of love, I either have nothing to say or I’d just be reciting clichés.’
So Amy has to rephrase her question once more, she has to be more specific. She attempts another round, but her question remains as vague, like she has no real gist of the main arguments made around the subject of love within philosophy. When in doubt, quote Plato, and that’s exactly what she does. ‘Plato often spoke of this, maybe you could just talk about that?’
By now somewhat irate, Derrida decides to interview himself. ‘One of the first questions you could pose … I’m just searching a bit … is the question of the difference between the who and the what. Is love the love of someone or the love of something? Okay, supposing I loved someone, do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? I love you because you are you (he points his finger towards the camera). Or do I love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence? Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone? The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love, separates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does the heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity or because I love the way that someone is? Often, love starts with some kind of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realise the other person doesn’t merit our love. The other person isn’t like this or that. So at the death of love, it appears that one stops loving another not because of who they are but because they are such and such. That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. The question of being, to return to philosophy—because the first question of philosophy is What is it “to be”? What is being? The question of being is itself always already divided between who and what. Is “being” someone or something? I speak of it abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between the division of the who and the what. One wants to be true to someone—singularly, irreplaceably—and one perceives that this someone isn’t x or y. They didn’t have the qualities, properties, the images that I thought I’d loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.’
I was still dying when I met you. I just didn’t know it at the time. I wasn’t wise enough to recognise the symptoms. I couldn’t fathom that the cancerous numbness that had besieged my heart was in fact the consequence of multiple stabs being consistently delivered at the hands of a scorned lover. I was barely seventeen when I first met him. I was so pitifully young, nubile and naïve. He, an economist and armchair philosopher, four years older than me, had aroused my appetite for the intellectual. He found in me facets that I always wished existed; beauty, intelligence, vivacity.
He had a flair for language, a penchant towards rationality, and a tendency towards self-pity. Our initial correspondence was entirely over email, which nourished my hunger for wordplay, and within a week of consistent dialogue, I knew I was in love with him. It took him longer to gauge the depth of his feelings for me. You see, he had just died before he met me. He had been burnt at the hands of a woman who had fallen in and out of love with him before he had the time to even experience limerence. At twenty-one, when I first moved to Delhi, it was to live with him. He had relocated his life from Bombay and had started work with a public policy think-tank. We lived in a less than modest barsati in Green Park, for a full year, until he shifted to Hyderabad to advance his career. That was the second betrayal among many subtle ones that were to follow. The first remains too painful to recount.
A staunch libertarian, he had envisaged our relationship as a utopic experiment. ‘Your body is yours,’ he would tell me. ‘You can be with whoever you want, just don’t tell me about it.’ At twenty-two, with him away in Hyderabad, with my having set up residence in that tiny quarter in JNU that was allotted to me, tasting, for the first time in my life what it meant to be independent, and sampling, almost virginally, the alluring world of desire, I drank in everything that came my way, I drank so much, so quickly, and so thirstily, that I soon grew intoxicated by the pleasures of pursuit. No more was I the insecure, coy, small-town girl who was oblivious to her own charms. I tumbled dizzily into the world of heat and lust, the land of fuck. I inscribed every man I conquered in the pages of my notebook, and soon, my writing was drenched in the exquisite wetness of desire. The lover remained a constant, I never doubted my feelings for him, but I was able to separate, with calculating precision, the universe of love and the paradise of sex. I had a pattern: I often chose men who were either wanderers or settlers on the verge of departure. I sought men who had no strings to attach, who appreciated the virtue of intellectual foreplay, men who had a peculiar talent for persuasion, men, who, when they finally had you pinned against them, made you wonder if you had been seduced or if this was what you had wanted all along. I revelled in this newfound ecstasy, and each orgasm brought me closer to the world of words. I came against my private landscape of thoughts, it wasn’t blood that would rush to every corner of my brain but whole sentences, syllables gushing through my circulatory system, language seeping through my pores, each sigh a turn of phrase dying to be archived.
Until one morning, after a stretch of sleepless nights spent making love to J (the sleep-fucker), days before I was to leave university and return home, I found myself besotted by him. Soon it was mid-May, the season of returnings. I was back in Bombay, had spent my last hours in Delhi with J so that I had barely any time to pack my things and I had to leave so much behind. J was back in Paris, but before leaving, came to visit me in Bombay and we spent three nights together on the kitchen floor of a friend’s apartment. G was done with his stint in Hyderabad and was back in Bombay. He’d been accepted into Columbia and there were barely three months to go until he left for New York.
J had seeped into my body and the scent of him was attached to every fibre of my being. The territories between love and sex, which were once so perfectly defined, had begun to collapse. I found myself repelled by every touch that wasn’t J’s, and I felt nothing when G fucked me. In fact, his caresses would leave me numb and dry—no man has ever left me that dry. I realised only later that what I had begun to feel for him was the opposite of love: contempt. It was sparked off by a chain of events that followed once he discovered I had slept with J, and was besotted by him, and then understood that there had been other men too, and that I had taken his advice about my body being my own to heart.
Over the next two months we began a series of negotiations. He would ‘forgive’ me my ‘sins’, as he called them, if only I shared with him each glorious detail. When I refused, on ethical grounds, we proceeded into war. I was cornered into playing defence and I eventually crumbled into a paralytic silence. And all the while, all through this mindless torture, through our alternating peace pacts and blitzkriegs, we continued to end each correspondence with the love cry. The words ‘I love you’ had become a habit, an involuntary tick. Over the six years we had spent together, we had said it so often that by now it had lost all significance. It had become hollow. It was neither an avowal nor a symptom of some kind of pathological condition of being in love, it was merely a learned habit, like covering your mouth when you cough or saying, ‘Excuse me’ when you sneeze; a polite, hygienic, neutral habit, neither good nor bad. We had arrived at a stalemate, but we were both too polite to call it quits, too scared to admit that our love was, in the end, contrary to what we would have liked to believe, neither unconditional nor eternal.
Everything unravelled much like it does in Botton’s Essays in Love when Chloe finally admits to the narrator that she’s been seeing his friend Will. Even before her confession, he had sensed the rupture within their relationship when all the little things she used to find adorable about him suddenly became irritants, and he found himself indulging in acts of romantic terrorism, much like G had begun to do. Botton’s narrator, foreseeing the end of his relationship with Chloe, has a disturbing insight about how the thought of the end hangs over every love story, even when it is at its climax. The only difference between the end of love and the end of life, he says, is that at least in the latter, we are granted the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly not the end of life.
G, in a final fit of rage, emailed me a set of curses:
This is over! There is nothing more to be spoken about this. There is only a past and there is no future. You are a selfish and abhorrent person and I wish no one has to go through the distinct dishonour of having to love you or be loved by you. May you die a thousand deaths at the hands of your shrivelling conscience. I would wish hell on your afterlife, but then that would be too light a punishment for what you are becoming.
I hope you fry in your own juices every day, I hope that your heart turns to stone and that you can’t feel a thing. May the numbness spread to your brain and may you never write another word that satisfies you. Every time you have sex or look lustfully at a man or a woman, may your cunt freeze and turn dry. You should live in the daily hell, knowing that you drove the man who made the mistake of loving you to hatred and rage.
By the end of July, I was empathising with Miller’s condition. Down and out in Paris, struggling to survive, he thinks back to the impasse he and his wife Mona (June) had found themselves in. We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could not recognise the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean, he writes in his epic Tropic of Cancer.
I was still dying when I met you. I was in a state of trauma. I was struggling with language. The juice that had once flowed so swiftly through my body had indeed been sapped dry. I was empty. But when I met you, in the middle of the monsoon, on that fated day, the second of August, the roots of my being that I was sure had long since withered were suddenly replenished. Some small sliver of life was resurrected. It would take time for me to heal but I found, suddenly, the will to rise from my ashes and renew myself.
In the beginning there was uncertainty. After the first seduction, after the first orgasm, when there was, in my mind, no thought of any continuance, you took it upon yourself to pursue me.
You were supposed to be a one-night stand. A quick fix. A conquest. A ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers.
But you had other designs. You seduced me. First with your persistence and later, after I’d relented, with your measured indifference.
In the beginning there was resistance, there were thoughts of escape, as if I had already some inclination of the monumental possibilities of our passion and, threatened by the thought of having to surrender to spiritual bondage, thought it best to flee. But you had already seeped into my system, you had already planted fresh roots, and I found myself incapable of letting you go. You mystified me. Your gait, your charm, your contented solitude, the aura you radiated of being so blissfully unattached to anyone and yet desirous of a dialogue with me. I was convinced your heart was bubble-wrapped and bulletproof, too cautious to yield to the dictates of another and yet, when I confessed to you how deeply you had entrenched yourself under my skin, how you had begun to invade the landscape of my dreams, you made me seem like a coward who was too afraid to let go.
I told you once, over the phone, that I found myself hung up on you. ‘It’s horrible,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be hung up.’
‘Why is it such a horrible thing?’ you said, and for a few moments I was speechless.
‘I don’t know,’ I finally admitted. ‘It’s you. Your heart is made of lead4, or some really strong metal. It’s bulletproof. You are impossible to penetrate.’
‘That’s not true. What makes you think that? Give it some time,’ you said.
I was in love with you long before I knew it. And when I did, I wasn’t sure what to do with the revelation. Neither did you. Often, it seemed unnecessary to have to articulate it, almost extraneous, so we left it as something unsaid, unspoken, an implicit fact, a given, and we chose not to confront each other with the obvious. We relegated it, instead, to the region of nuance. Occasionally, over an e-conversation, fragments of this ‘love cry’ would slip. ‘Love you’, or ‘Love’ or extensions, like ‘Kisses’, ‘Hugs’, but never the whole phrase, always parts, and always on paper or through virtual prisms, never face to face.
Sometimes, when your rhythmic snores signify your fall into sleep, I, still awake, still haunted by the throes of consciousness, gaze at your moonlit face, and I utter the words, but with such practised softness that no sound ever escapes my lips. I mouth the words and imagine their resonance, but I never allow them to slip past, I do not breathe them into life, and thus, never give you reason to hear my incantation. And yet you often do. And when you do, you do not reply, you do not say a word, you simply reach out for my hand and in the middle of your sleep, kiss the back of my palm, reasserting, through the medium of touch, this skin-communicated thing that exists between us.
The morning after your babbling, I woke up before you, a rare feat considering I get my best sleep after dawn, and I went into the living room to find my moleskine. I set it on the table and dug through my purse for the perfect pen, the one with the thin nib that is just the perfect weight, neither too heavy nor too light, to facilitate a quick long-hand session. I made myself a cup of tea, sat down before the marble-top table, and immersed myself in recounting on paper last night’s wine-infused exchange. I was ecstatic. I had spent so much time agonising about this chapter on love, I was getting nowhere, the subject seemed as elusive as ever, and no amount of reading, no amount of theory could illuminate for me its vagaries. And then we stumbled into conversation last night and everything suddenly seemed to come together, language didn’t seem as mucky, and though I knew there was no hope for ordered thought, because the very nature of love resists structural makeovers, I finally had something I could work with.
You emerged from the bedroom about an hour later. It was now around 8 a.m., and you found me busy transcribing.
‘Good morning,’ you said.
I tugged at your hand, drew you towards me and kissed you.
‘What are you up to?’
‘Remember that chapter I told you I’d been struggling with? The one on love? Well, last night came as a revelation, and now I have to document it before it gets eclipsed.’
‘So you mean I had to perform?’ you said.
‘I suppose,’ I said, and returned your impish grin.
‘I’m your guinea pig, am I not?’
‘Those are your words, not mine,’ I said, citing the same phrase you are known to use when, in jest, I accuse you of crimes like not missing me enough when you’re away, or not caring enough about me.
Your glance fell on my cup of tea.
‘You made yourself tea but didn’t make any for me?’
‘I’ve noticed that whenever you wake up before me, you make yourself tea but don’t make any for me, so today I didn’t make any for you,’ I lied. There was a full cup waiting for you in the kettle on the kitchen counter.
‘But that’s because you only get up after eight.’
‘That doesn’t mean I don’t want tea,’ I teased.
‘So if I were to bring you tea, you’d get up?’
‘You’ll have to find out. Now give me two minutes, I’ll get you a cup.’
The next morning I woke up to find your side of the bed vacant. I reached for my phone and checked the time; still 7 a.m. I moved myself to the centre of the bed, so I was in between your side and mine, and fell into a trance-like state of sleep. I woke up to the sound of movement. I could feel your presence hovering over me. I opened my eyes to find you leaning over me, mug in hand. You lowered it towards me, but only so much so that I had to sit up to meet you halfway. You propped a pillow against my back so I could lean against the wall, and then rested the mug within my palms. I said nothing, neither did you. We simply exchanged consensual smiles.
I knew this was a one-time gesture. You were making a point. I savoured the tea, nonetheless. You’d mixed the roasted leaves with a spoonful of Marguerite Hope, a combination I’m not crazy about, but you’d excitedly ordered two tins of each, and we were stuck with them and they needed to be finished.
However, within the next two weeks, you served me‘bed tea’ at least six times. Each time felt like a fresh surprise. You also began to pay attention to detail: you’d use the right mug, the one with my name on it, unlike in the beginning, when you’d give me your mug instead. You managed to perfect the brew so it was neither too bitter nor too weak. It is now consistently crisp and smoky.
Each time, you prop the pillow behind my back and leave the mug in my hands, and I look up at you and smile and recite a sheepish ‘Thank you’. What I want to tell you, in fact, is that this new little gesture that you’ve begun makes me fucking joyous. Not because I enjoy being served, in fact, I usually display much resistance towards being pampered in any way but, in part, because this simple gesture always manages to transport me to my childhood when, on mornings when I was either sick or would wake up with a coughing fit, my mother would come to my bed with either a hot cup of tea or eggnog, place it in my hand, and then leave me to finish it. I would sit up and sip the soothing warm liquid and feel it glide down my throat and into my belly, my mind still caught up in sleep, so that the physical act of sipping and swallowing mingled with the psychological act of dreaming and I would find myself lulled by the liquid heat. I’d then place the glass on the floor and fall back into sleep as if I were under a spell.
What I thought was a one-time performance has now become a ritual. And perhaps I am still in that stage of instrumental conditioning when I haven’t made the link between your exiting the bed before me and the subsequent offering of morning tea. I still find myself utterly surprised. Part of my astonishment stems from recognising how this sort of gesture isn’t coded into your being. You are not a natural caretaker. In fact, within the dynamics of our relationship, I am the nurturer and you are the one that enjoys being pampered. I am the one giving you hour-long massages and administering to your aches. And I never expected it to be any other way, because I have, since I met you, never wanted to change a thing about you, because for you to change on my account would be for you to no longer be the person I fell in love with, because the who is so indelibly connected with the what, and the what with the who. They are not the distinct categories that Derrida would have us believe them to be. And‘absolute singularity’, too, is a myth.
It makes me wonder if being in love with someone and being loved by that someone is in fact a process of constant revelations; if one’s ‘being’ is not, in fact, a fixed phenomenological category because at any given time, we are always a subset of multiple selves, never a single, unchanging one. If we are not indeed in a constant state of flux, permanently altering what we believe to be our true selves in relation to the also persistently transforming loved one, we are shedding old habits to acquire new ones, adopting new sensibilities because the previous ones don’t harmonise well enough with the loved one’s eccentricities.
Our six years together have involved a series of exposures where everyday we come closer to knowing the other’s true core. As we continue our individual transformations, spurred by our relentless contact with each other, we mould ourselves to fit against the other, we conceive of new tricks, fresh devices with which to manipulate the other, we navigate the compulsions of our innate proclivities in order to be better versions of ourselves for the sake of the other, we seek out shreds of wisdom from our slew of previous encounters, so that love becomes an ongoing quest towards perfection.
Ours is no mediocre love. There is a tragic monumentality to its passion and dimensions. It exists despite reason or logic or convenience, and it continues to consume us, hold us captive to its whims. It is a love that aspires to reach out to the eternal but the realm of its existence is stubbornly yet exquisitely entrenched in the dictates of the everyday. There is no future in sight; there is only the pronounced absence of any. Ours is a present-tense love. And that is reason enough for its sublimity.
3 Intriguingly, in Ali Smith’s Artful, an insightful, genre-bending book about a narrator who is haunted by the ghost of her former lover, who, around the time of his death, was writing a series of lectures about art and literature which the narrator decides to complete in his absence, there’s a passage towards the end of Chapter 3, ‘On Edge’, when an uncanny imagining on her part has suddenly been decoded, the narrator is mystified. It is nighttime and she decides to hit the sack: ‘I got in on my side and put my head back on to the pillow. I stretched an arm and a leg over to your side of the bed. Then I moved my whole self to the middle of the mattress, actually the best place in the bed for a good night’s sleep.’ I would have included this passage in my treatise on our sleep patterns, but I chanced upon Artful much later and was amazed at the significance of that one phrase: the middle of the mattress. It is interesting that when either of us sleep alone in bed, like when we take our afternoon siestas, we both tend to occupy the centre, as if it were indeed a bridge connecting us to the absent other. As if in the act of occupying it, we could suddenly, magically, be two people at once. It is not as though our identities merge, but it is as though they exist on the edge of each other’s consciousness. Sleep with the absent present.
4 When I read this out to you, you corrected me, ‘Lead can’t be bulletproof. It’s a very soft metal; in fact, bullets were made out of lead. The ones that are now banned were called dumdum bullets. You should look it up.’ I did. They were called expanding bullets. This is what Wikipedia had to say: ‘An expanding bullet is a bullet designed to expand on impact, increasing in diameter to limit penetration and/or produce a larger diameter wound. It is informally known as Dum-dum or a dumdum bullet. The two typical designs are the hollow-point bullet and the soft-point bullet,’ all of which made me wonder if you were always made of flesh and if cupid’s arrow had lead at its precipice.