Love Is What?

Love is like the soft flicking of Faerie wings on a crisp Autumn night, as they track you down in your driveway and swarm buzzily around you, stinging.

Love is like waking up from a terrible nightmare and feeling refreshed and rested. And you get out of bed with vigor and find yourself going about your day, and the whole world seems perfect. And in the back of your mind, you know perfectly well that this is the dream, and you’re going right back to that nightmare whenever you actually wake up. Is that your alarm?

Love is the soft sighng of the gentle wind, as the last vestiges of oxygen are sucked out of the Earth’s atmosphere by patient, patient extraterrestrials who like their food fresh, but hate getting their hands dirty.

Romance is a wine so bold and complex that you can’t really taste the cyanide.

Courtship is an intricate game, and the only way to win is not to play.

The heart is, indeed, the home of special feelings. Unfortunately, since the heart has no ability to process sensory data, or even absorb it, and must needs do so specifically at the direction of the mind, I can’t actually see why we care if emotions reside in that organ. It’s not like we can do anything with them.

When two souls meet in harmony and entwine, they make celestial music. Specifically, they make William Shatner’s 1968 album, “The Transformed Man”.

True love lasts forever. Which, given the number of people who’ve fallen in love and then fallen out of it, means that “true love” is, statistically speaking, incredibly unlikely. So I guess most of the other love out there would, by that reasoning, be false love?

I could see that. I could definitely see that.

Conversely, I’ve heard that no-one dies of a broken heart, which is definitely contradicted by medical records. If they mean it metaphorically, I ain’t buyin’ it. Sadness can weaken the heart quite deeply. In a literal, not a figurative, sense. Emotions have direct physiological impact and potentially affect longterm outcomes. That’s indisputable.

Likewise, I try to keep my actual heart in good shape, and my figurative heart in a small locked box on my desk. It’s close enough that I can get it if I ever really need it, but frankly, there’s a lot of dust on the box. Or, at least, I imagine there would be, if I could find it underneath all these papers. I’m trying to make my way through the pile of notes, but it’s difficult, because I make it bigger on the daily.

It’s said that love is the most pleasant possible distraction; but I think the people who said that were extremely distracted at the time.

Jeff Mach


 

My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities and create things. Every year, I put on Evil Expo, the Greatest Place in the World to be a Villain. I also write a lot of fantasy and science fiction.. You can get most of my books right here. Go ahead, pre-order I HATE Your Prophecy“. It may make you into a bad person, but I can live with that.

Jeff Mach Written by:

Jeff Mach is an author, playwright, event creator, and certified Villain. You can always pick up his bestselling first novel, "There and NEVER, EVER BACK AGAIN"—or, indeed, his increasingly large selection of other peculiar books. If you'd like to talk more to Jeff, or if you're simply a Monstrous Creature yourself, stop by @darklordjournal on Twitter, or The Dark Lord Journal on Facebook.