Demon Spawn

You can try to define true love any way you want, but chances are, the words are going to fall short of the true definition. You could attempt to write a Hugoesque treatise on it and still not manage to quite capture it. You could try to craft a terse, Gumpian morsel made of economized wit and poignancy, but fail to do justice to the flood of emotions love entails. If love were easy to quantify, perhaps people wouldn't need to write about it so much, and yet here it is, being written and spoken and blogged about ad infinitum.

Or perhaps not. How many people try to define it, after all? A lot of people write about it just because it's a big part of their lives. They need to write about it. They want to write about it. It's not about waxing metaphysical, or demonstrating wisdom or experience. It's just... being human, I guess.

It has been an evasive subject for me as well - though I realize that a lot of my entries to date have at least tangentially been on the topic. I skirt around the edges most of the time, quite frankly, because I don't have that much to write about. I can't talk about it as directly as a lot of other people do. My understanding of it arrives only in the smallest of hints. Like an elusive deer, it lopes away from me with ease, betwixt trees in a dark forest full of danger and threat, leaving me naught but scarce tracks to follow. I have doubled back and again on the same trails, often without knowing, led astray by a quest far too wily for me and my loud, clumsy footsteps.

But it doesn't seem fair. I've learned so little, but why should that matter so much? Certainly knowledge and understanding are no prerequisites; attraction asks neither wit nor wisdom. Maybe it's entirely glandular. Maybe there's no intellectual aspect to it at all. Maybe the better analogy is not that of the hunter, but of the hunted, stumbling through the forest thinking I have some idea of what I'm looking for, only to be easily tailed by that blasted cupid, being shot through the heart from behind, his cruel, barbed arrows dripping the venom of spite and the poison of pain, snagging in flesh. Every time, I've had to rip those damned arrows out, leaving torn, jagged, unsightly wounds, gushing blood that feeds the forest floor.

But it's cupid's fault, for being a horrible, sadistic little imp. My image of cupid is that of a bat-winged brat slightly older than the cherub that typically portrays him. His mouth is frozen in a rictus grin, baring yellowed and jagged teeth in a smile remniscent of the schoolyard bully who pulls whiskers off kittens and pours salt on snails. His skin is sallow and stretched taut over wiry muscles and protruding bones, marked by the anomalous and distended belly of starvation and disease. Horrible, tangled scrags of greasy hair bristle from his armpits. He is so foul that flies, attracted to his stink, buzz their last and drop dead upon touching the aura of his malice. He's not an angel, or a Greek child-god... he's a demon. A reject outcast. The Furies' irritating kid brother, who stalks the unaware and shoots them in the back like the cowardly, honorless assassin that he is.

And yet... it's not like that. I have enough friends who are so happy in their relationships... I'd never wish them any less than that. I suppose we truly are in Plato's cave. For them, cupid's shadow plays against the wall and shows them something beautiful, makes them smile and sigh. His shadow is a nightmare for me. I have to change where I am... I have to get out of this part of the cave.