I love you trembles inside me. It trembles and I can feel it just the way I can feel you. You can’t think love, I know you can’t, not when you think about me. I’m the one who loves you, no matter what, and I love you, no matter that I want to take apart “I love you.”
“But, untranslatable,/ Love remains/ A future in brains.” (Laura Riding)
I love you.
What or who is the subject of this sentence, the object or the subject? Love confuses by constructing a subject/object relation that forgets what or why it is — who subject, who object. “You” never refuse “I,” my love.
To Paige, a torn-up heart, its pieces scattered on the table top, represented all the broken hearts, not just hers. There were too many to name and count, countless numbers.
“My first broken heart wasn’t a romance. My heart broke before I even thought about love. It broke when I wanted something and couldn’t have it, and I don’t even remember when or what that was.”
“…When the original object of an instinctual desire becomes lost in consequence of repression, it is often replaced by an endless series of substitute objects, none of which ever give full satisfaction.” (Freud)
Paige worried that memory, like love, was something she couldn’t make decisions about, even when she made sense of the past, or it made some sense to her. Unlike love, memory was constant, and she was never without it. It was holding her hand as she tailored hearts.
Dearest,
I can’t think straight, I can’t do what I’m supposed to do. I can’t eat or write or wash or cry or scream or die or decide, since loving you. Now “I love you” becomes a suffocated gasp, an involuntary gush. When you touch me, I can’t swallow, when you touch me, everything’s a movie, and everything in me moves over to sigh. I gasp, I suffocate, I gush for you. If “I love you” becomes a lament, then I will gag on love and die.
“Know you not the goddess of love/ and the power of her magic?” (Wagner, Tristan and Isolde)
“ ‘Cause love comes in spurts/In dangerous flirts/and it murders your heart/They didn’t tell you that part/Love comes in spurts/Sometimes it hurts/Love comes in spurts/oh no, it hurts.” (Richard Hell)
I love you is the structure through which I love you. “I” is such a lonely, defiant letter. In this fatal and fateful sentence it’s the first word — in the beginning, there was I — a pronoun, the nominal subject. In the love sentence, “I” submits to “you.” That I is mine. That I is yours. That I is for you.
Dearest,
I’m the one who loves you better, longer, stronger, whose passion robs you of passion, whose daring steals your courage, whose boldness provokes your fear, whose gentleness savages you, whose absence electrifies you.
Paige waved a paper heart in the air and pretended to enact an ancient, time-honored ritual. She considered burning the heart in a funeral pyre and laughed out loud, a hollow sound with reverberations only for her. You never see yourself laughing, Paige realized. Once upon a time a man she loved caught her looking at herself in a mirror and noticed something she didn’t want him to see.
“I’ll be your mirror/ I’ll be your mirror/ Reflect what you are/ In case you don’t know.” (Lou Reed)
“The woman who sang those lines died in a bicycle accident on an island. When she first sang the song, she was beautiful and somber and lonely, but not alone. She died in what’s called a freak accident, and, at the time of her death, her body was swollen from years of shooting heroin, so she was no longer beautiful, but she was always, or still, lonely. It was spring when she died, it may have been summer.”
I love you.
Love, the second word in the sentence, is the verb and acts by joining the two pronouns, pro-lovers, you and I. Love melts “you” into “I” or is it just grammar that bends “I” into “you,” just that old subject to object-of-the-verb magic? Love dissolves disbelief, since it defies credulity. Love establishes an impossible, enduring, tender, spidery bridge between us, two poor pronouns. You and I are simple, one-syllable words, you and I need love.
“We do not see what we love, but we love in the hope of confirming the illusion that we are indeed seeing anything at all.” (Paul de Man)
“Stereotype/Monotype/Blood type/Are you my type?” (Vernon Reid)
Paige shuffled the hearts and named each of them, and while she did, forced herself to remember him and herself with as much detail and vividness as she could bear. It’s often hard to bear your own history. A languid heaviness coursed through her and then settled like a stone in her stomach.
“I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with him. The cars and trucks rumbling and tearing beneath us were terrifying. He thought it was weird that I didn’t find any security in the fact that there was something solid under our feet. He held my hand, the way I hold this heart. Later, we went for Indian food. It was the first time I ever ate it. Then we went back to my place and made love for the first time, too. He stroked the insides of my thighs.”
“Love u more than I did when u were mine.” (Prince)
“The heart you betrayed,/ the heart you lost,/ see in this hour/ what a heart it was.” (Bellini, Norma)
Dearest,
I’m afraid now too, though I’m not actually walking over a bridge. There isn’t anything beneath my feet. I can’t breathe or yawn or laugh or smile or cook or move or run or jump or stand or sit. I am restless. Bedeviled angel, sweet oxymoron, I ask questions you can’t possibly answer. I’m not reasonable, absolutely not, why should I be, why should you? Really, I only have questions and you are a question to me, you are the question. I ask myself — you — what is it you want and what is it I want. Our wanting isn’t going to be enough, though it is for now, wanting you is enough now. I can’t live without you. See how you have destroyed me?
“For love — I would/ split open your head and put/ a candle in/ behind the eyes.” (Robert Creeley)
Even so, or even more, I love you.
“You” is, you are, the last word, the last word and the first one too. In “you” there are two letters more than “I”—the difference is a diphthong, two vowels to create one sound — ooh, you-ooh. The vowels demand each other, they nestle together to make their sound.
Dearest,
My love clings to you. It is silent and dark, hidden from everyone else but you. Love is silent, sex is noisy. To write love, that’s what I really want, and to write it to you must be finding silence also. Soundlessly, I’d put everything into words, and though the words are not actually love but how love would speak if it could — if my heart could talk — the words would make no sound. Yet, through my desire, with my will, they would strike a chord inside you. My words would creep and slither into you, if I had my way, and I want my way with you, and words once inert on paper would suddenly wing through the air like missiles. Silly or profound, they would fly into you, and you would embrace them or, more perfectly, they would embrace you. You would be entered, love, you would be my precious entrance to love and also my final destination, eternal enchantment.
“What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:/ Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid./ Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,/ Shall I reproach you dead?” (Paul Verlaine)
Paige drank green tea and wondered what had happened to him, the lanky, green-eyed young man who hated himself, who said, I don’t know why you like me. She hadn’t liked him but had loved something about him.