I said once (and I meant it when I said it) that the word love wasn't used enough. I said that love should be the first word on our lips in the morning and the last word in our minds in the evening. I said love could not be spent like currency. Love is not a zero sum game; there is no way to run out of it. Before I said that, I would say that the word love was used too often. I said that people would use love as an excuse, as a crutch, as a method of distraction. Love was a word spoiled by casual romantics.

I never once tried to reconcile the two positions with each other. They were polar opposites. I wrote it all off as a simple change of mind. But I was too easy on myself. At times, my mind shifts and rolls like the ocean. I hem and haw on an issue until I have seen both sides so often I can barely tell one from the other. Too much love, no, not enough, or maybe, maybe...

Maybe neither of the two.

Lately this is all I hear. Love. Lately this is all anyone seems to want to talk about. I just want to feel love once, or, I just want to tell himher I love himher, or, why doesn't heshe tell me they that they love me because they must because I do, or, I just want to make love to someone, somewhere, anyone anywhere, who wants to make love to me too. And they toss around the word love as if there's no other word to describe such a powerful feeling, and if there isn't another word then language has failed us and we should all just stop talking and give up any hope of a world where words are enough. A world where I can send you a letter and you will read it and know that when i say this I really mean this, or when I say this I really mean that.

I have not loved as much as some, but I have loved. I have not lived as much as some, but I have lived. Don't lie to me and tell me you're any different. Don't lie to me and tell me that you know.

You're all poets. Stop pretending you're not. Give me a new word to use, give me a new way to show you how I feel, or give me a reason to believe that when you say this you really mean this.

if this was a rant, it was directed at all of you. if it wasn't, then you may take it as best suits you.

The moment comes when the words suddenly tank. They are not enough, and -at the same time- they are too much. Words come with their cortege of associations. Every time you speak or write you are using a tool that has been handed to you by the generations before. The tool was not left unmarked or unmarred.
I am speaking English: using a language that alternately fascinates and irritates me. I, the eternal ESL boy. I used to believe, at a certain time, that I was unable to love in English. It is certain that I never tried.
I would like to have less inhibition about my English. But I carry inside of me the memories of a thousand English classes, of marks on exam papers. Spinsters, teaching me about shall and will and would and should: I will never use this language in a less than conscious way.
I tell to myself "700 millions Indians speak English in their own way, and they even write books". Why don't I declare my variant a dialect-of-one ? It can't happen. I have the OED on a little altar. Grammar won't let me alone.

One day, I hope that I will be able to say "I love you" without thinking about a computer virus, and without feeling like the thousandth rerun of a stickily romantic american movie. It will be difficult; instead of concentrating on the coral ear of my beloved, I will be trying to get the vowel in "love" just right.
I would like to swim in words, to roll in language. Instead, I am like a whale wallowing in a thick Sargasso sea.

These are all languages we know. Myriad different ways to try to tell each other all the brittle things we cannot make understood in the space between our hardened eyes. I knew a language once, made up of words and simple smiles and it told stories.

This is not that. This is this.

This is a different language, full of all that I have left to say to you. I cannot make this list from words because they cut too harshly, and only aggravate the distance. I'm writing you a letter in flashing brushstrokes, melting down every possible angle of your skin into a color and another and another, thickly overlaid and full of wrath, of love, of trying to comprehend.

Melting you. Melting you down into your skin in the only way I still know how.

Maybe you won't hear my words in this new language. Maybe you'll see it as only another pretty picture, ugly in its own horrible way, but never in a way you would want to understand. Maybe you'll be too walled off still to bring yourself to look at it at all. But it's possible, just possible, that you may be capable of translating what I've given you into another language, the language of your heart that you meticulously evacuated and barred me from so very long ago. Maybe you can make this language I've invented into something you can understand, and finally -- finally we can speak again.

But no longer with the words that we used to use.

No longer in the language of lovers, but in cautious tones, veiled meanings, hidden aching hurts that cannot be exposed right now. I can tell you of the words that ripped me open time and time and time again, curling computer print-outs bundled in neat red ribbon that I can't throw out, sitting in a corner of my room. Words I cannot bring myself to burn, no matter how much I'd love to watch turn to carbon all these things that I've been longing to destroy.

I printed out these words because they touched me, and I could not let go of that even though I cannot look at them through these eyes.

I'm tired of you trying to hurt me, and of my any act of reconciliation becoming only another attack. And so I'll try just one more time....

Take my words and see what they may mean to you. I've wrapped them as best I know how and hope that they will be a bridge. A way of crossing over that says everything without needing to say that which we cannot.

Take these words.

You'll find them as they're blowing in the wind.

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