Surely you would say that so far I haven’t written about love, but, on the contrary, about how people break up, about the inverse of love that’s not hatred but parting, isn’t it weird? The reverse of a feeling should still be a feeling. Perhaps it really is, instead, an amalgam of states, indifference, exasperation, boredom, regrets of all kinds, and in short, regret. When love leaves, it evaporates, we don’t even bother to understand what’s left behind, to give it a name for the feeling that takes the place of love, a definition, also a derisory one, but to know what’s left of love apart from the divorce paper. We sometimes know what the helplessness, the frustration, the feeling of suffocation are that we feel when love is dead. We are prisoners, and we suffer after freedom; we want freedom. Sometimes some of us get it at the cost of great suffering, and that’s because for so long since we’ve loved the earth since we’ve made this feeling the highest aspiration, the most secret desire, the brightest expectation, we haven’t been able to accept that it’s not eternal as it promises us, as we feel it in its first moments. All our energies go to the search for love, to the experience of love, leaving no room of thought for what will be afterwards. We have this vast mental disability; everything seems immortal to us, our life, love, happiness and no substantial evidence can convince us, otherwise. For some, love becomes a drug they need to live; for others, it’s a passing drink. None of the solutions resembles the miraculous intensity of the first moments, some just a kind of race to stay together at all costs, to others a hangover with the taste of life and the desire for fresh air and tranquillity. Stop, you’ll pass remarks indignantly again, but there are so many who stay together, couples who live together every day without such intensity and expectation. Without enthusiasm and expectations, it might seem that there is nothing left but a searing and monotonous life, but paradoxically they are the quietest, they have managed to turn intensity into domestic joys and metaphysical expectations into current life plans. And they’re doing very well, they at least have a solution, they’re together, and they’ve found something else. Maybe a different kind of love, a feeling where friendship has become the main ingredient, and then the habit, the twosomes, the acceptance that it’s better not to be alone if and only if after 30 years of marriage you go home with pleasure. This is the condition and the barometer, if you fail to turn off the computer to go home from work even though the job is over and everyone is gone, then surely love has gone and in its place only the desire to be free and the immense frustration that you are not (the opposite of love). And I can’t help but think, desperately close, about how it’s possible to poke our universe long and wide, search, explore outside and not try to find a solution to these problems that are actually the very ones that build us up. Why do we get impossible issues in physics, mathematics, chemistry, and we don’t see that we need a solution to love, a real or imaginary solution but a solution so that we can live happily in two, in one, in any, if any.
