Love

The mark of a moving film is if I cannot sleep after seeing it, then wake with it first in my thoughts the morning after. Watching the film, I invested my passion in someone else's passion; I was in love with two lovers who lived before I was born. Their tragedy was having a destiny overruled by fate: meant to be together, but doomed by ill timing or distant duties to be apart. The film convinced me, could they have tied their lives into one cord, not merely their world but mine were well. Now, lying in darkness, painting the ceiling with my thoughts, my mind finds no relief from the meditation, they who burned for union are bones under scattered tombs. Who can sleep knowing lovers who wanted the sky went under the earth?

A conundrum of lovers is who will die first. Though the masses sweat and diet to live longer, in love dying first is lucky, because living longer means living on alone. Therefore both lovers wish the other to be lucky and die first, since worse than grieving is to think of the beloved grieving. Yet equally, both wish first exit for themselves, preferring not living to outliving living's meaning.

The only suitable death is simultaneous death, neither to leave behind nor be left. Happy is the widower who follows his cooling wife into the ground within a week. Happy are the honeymooners whose car careens from the cliff, smashing their atoms into everlasting union.

The more that models nip and tuck toward perfection, the more boring their beauty becomes. Have we not seen blond hair, spotless skin, implanted breasts, and a 24-inch waist before? Like Plato's eternal Forms, perfection has only one cast from which all copies are cut. Beauty is more alluring with a blemish, because imperfections add uniqueness. A beautiful face with an off-centered smile or oddly-dimpled chin says to the eye, there is only one me. Though beauty ought not to have warts, it ought to have texture. Polished beauty has a quality of mass production, while blemishes provide a patch of particularity to which desire attaches more firmly. No wonder Zeus, the Greeks' most amorous god, preferred mortal girls to shining goddesses.