Love is Pain

A few years ago, during a late August summer, I made my way to a small Christian retreat center in the middle of the woods. Pine trees and mountains everywhere. In exchange for room and board, I volunteered as cook and a ground keeper. Even though it was beautiful there, I went there to escape my depression and daily headaches. But when I got there, they only intensified due to an unrelenting heartache. I missed my then boyfriend so much. His name was K. He was my first familiarity with a kind of torrential love affair. No, we never fought--not even when we broke up. But we were relentlessly playing a game of emotional tug-a-war. The relationship a constant struggle to express ourselves in the other and fought for the domination of each other's psyches as if every time we made love we gave birth to deeper and darker and more bitter venom. I think it was because we both knew from the first exchange of glances that we hated each other in the way that a smaller animal hated a bigger one. But it was a kind of hate for ourselves that we saw and projected unto one another. I was older and had the upper hand. He was severely arrogant and deeply insecure. I was sick in the head and he was too.
We fell in love with one another so desperately that we might have sank and transfused into one another. To be in love with him was to be suicidal. It was an emotional pain we both sadistically craved.
When we made love to one another, we devoured one another like ravaged animals, blood ready to give and take. Time was our enemy because it was both at once too expansive, too close, and too far away. We wanted to escape from the frameworks of reality and bury and hide ourselves in each other's bodies as well. To be with him was to be part of a pornographically disastrous poem. A poem gaudy and awful. A poem that was also sublime and harrowing. Sometimes it was light and often times cute.
The first time we met, I played him a song and he started to cry.
Then, I left him just to see if he would still want me. He did at first. But then he left.