How Do You Martians Say "I Love You"?

Crikey O Reilly this is hard work.

Campaigning against the bankrupt Labour-fascist government? Nah.

Reading the comments at Harry's Place? No. It's a pleasure.

Slagging off the atheists who call everyone who doesn't share their worldview a nutter? Erm, no, though that's quite hard (I probably am mad).

Trying to make serious contact with women?

*ahem*

Fuck me this is like scaling the north face of the fucking Eiger (not that I've done anything harder than walked up the hill to the fucking pub - and nor do I intend to).

For crying out fucking loud, when will human beings (and I think we've been this way for a hundred thousand years or more) - understand that love and hate, far from being opposites, are two sides of the same FUCKING COIN! Depth is depth, passion is passion and ties are ties. We are bodily connected but then we take it further, away from cock and cunt, and we carve ourselves into another's soul.

They do it to us too.

When they stop doing it, when they stop writing with their words and their looks into our hearts, then we notice the absence of the twinge and we feel the pain of the heart scabbing itself up: repairing and redrawing its surfaces. That hurts so much more than the initial wounds, and the hurts of the repairing last for the rest of our lives.

And some fool always, always, asks if we are over it yet, or worse demands that we get over it. Well, if we did, we'd be machines, monstrous, evil, unfeeling, machines, who move from body to body absorbing whatever we can take from it and moving on.

No.

In love someone carves themselves into you, you do the same, and you bind yourselves together in whatever hormonal feelings you have that then become part of thought and part of weltanschauung: we carry another person (not body, but body and soul) and they (hopefully) carry us.

We are not bonobos and we are not chimps (no common ancestor for 7 million years). We lie down together, weep together, fight together, die together.

Except that we don't, anymore. We don't die together.

We die apart, in nursing homes or hospices, or on late night roads on the way back from work. We die with memory, if it has survived, looking at those who loved and left us, those we left: we die with our "life partners" in mind and all of them either dead or many, many miles away, in another nursing home, or if they are lucky, in another family. We die with them giving us no thought at all. Ten years, twenty, thirty: it doesn't matter. In the end, they do not think of us, and we do not think of them, except, unconsciously, in the breath of the moment we see the hillside; in the glance at the youthful oak tree; in the shadow of the face of a young person.

We don't want to die together because it hurts. So we fuck someone else, and we think elsewhere, and we have porn, and we lie about our own bodies to ourselves.

And in the end we die.

We never said "I love you" and meant it: we never tied our own being to another; we never wanted the commitment love brought with it; we desired to love to turn into hate, so we could leave, and go, and feel alright when it stopped being about the sex, or the attraction, and it had become more about the selves.

No I am no projecting - I did say "I love you" and meant it: I did want to tie my being to another and for us to die together, however slow it was, however long it took. I wanted the other half of my being to lock into me and for us to walk together to all those places: the cinema; the pub; the school; the estate agent; the doctor's.

I was eight years, my only adult relationship, with a woman. I wanted monogamy. I wanted love, I wanted to share myself, truly.

It does exist. It's not a game.

We're only names in a dying memory, floating out into the equilibrium, while the nerves and connections and veins die off into soil. There we go, evaporating into time.

Gone.

We've gone. And, in the end, no-one gave a flying fuck.