What should you do when you're madly in love?

I am terrified to write this. Which is, of course, why I’m writing it. Debuted live on June 15 in NYC.

My brain has been rendered completely (and possibly irreversibly) barren by love. I’m not sure if love and poetry are natural complements or demonic contradictions:

Does being in love fuel creative passion? Or does it, like a deep, fugue-like animal satisfaction of having gorged on too much cream-filled dessert, hijack all your imaginative faculties with the thick, foggy bliss that torments limp-bodied pleasure-seekers in Peruvian opium dens?

I’ve been writing less, not because I’m broken but because I’m so whole I’ve become useless. And so the work suffers. I am a writer fed to death on honey. My genius (if I ever had any) withers under softness: it grows shy, it is bewitched and bedazzled by joy, absolutely incapable of applying itself to anything productive. There’s no vacuum cleaner in the world that could restore all the rooms of my brain to their former condition. Everything has changed.

What am I supposed to do with this kind of happiness, this embarrassment-of-riches kind of happiness? The kind that splits the sky like a dove coming down, or, the kind that makes my skin fit my body perfectly?

When you’re madly in love, you wake up with the nerves of someone who has survived a fatal accident and has been given a second chance at life. You surrender to the morning light, the thing that the sun has been doing for billions of years, you let it penetrate your eyelids with solid golden rays made scarlet by your own capillaries. When you’re madly in love, you don’t wake up at once. You wake up in layers, peel back all your dreams, like someone resurrecting from stratum to stratum, going through years of memories in flashes, flipping through your whole life like a book, and you think to yourself, “How on Earth did I get so lucky?”

When you’re madly in love, the air smells like something someone once swore they witnessed in heaven: the ozone in his shirt from the air conditioning, the metallic trace on his palm from clutching the keys, the tobacco cologne on his wrist, the sweat in his wiry-haired armpit. When you’re madly in love, you want to crawl back into his ribcage because from one of his ribs you were made and so you long to be bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, because you long to be known.

When you’re madly in love, you have the revelation that everything that has ever come before that—every insomniac night, every journal entry, every subtle rehearsal of a life you didn’t yet know how to live—was an imitation. A bad shadow play of what should be, what could be, what God had in mind on the day he invented touch. When you’re madly in love, all other relationships look like silhouettes pantomiming affection in Plato’s cave; none of them bleed in color, none of them smell like the salt and sugar of a future I could taste. I want there to be more seconds between the seconds, I want to claw time open, I want to unzip each moment and nestle inside it like Thumbelina in her walnut shell.

When you’re madly in love, everyday is the first day of the rest of your life. There is no other day. There was no yesterday, and everything feels true. I am in the collapse—an upward collapse. That rare phenomenon where things don’t fall apart but fall into place, like a divine hand had pressed the last tile into a mosaic and suddenly the pattern made sense—all the trials in every year of my life was worth it—no, it was more than “worth it,” it was necessary, like I couldn’t have ended up where I am today if I hadn’t fell in every single way before, like the frail little cradle of my existence, after all, was enough for the infinite radiance of that seeking, that seeking for everlasting and indestructible love.

I’ve found it, or rather, I stopped looking, and it found me—in the silence that doesn’t need to be filled, in the life I used to think I had to earn but which turns out, like grace, cannot be earned at all.

So, what should you do when you’re madly in love?

Nothing.

You should do nothing and just be. You should stare at him like a fool. You should ruin your routines. You should forget your ambitions for a moment, let your heart sing and let your soul have the day off. You should eat breakfast slowly. You should let the laundry pile up. You should rest your forehead into the nook of his neck and say, “You are here, for now, where everything is perfect and exactly where it should be.”

When you are madly in love, the most radical thing you can do is nothing. You shouldn’t care anymore. You have dropped the pen. There is no better story. There is only this, and this is enough. Let the world go on spinning. You, on the other hand, have already arrived.

~

Clive and Cosima (they’re dating)

This was read at “Tender Summer”, a live reading hosted with the talented Valerie, sarah cucchiara, Caroline Beuley, emily north, Sudana Krasniqi, and PRATHIGNA. Thank you to all who joined! Bravo to those who took the open mic!