Is. The house is quite Is. I is quite Is.

A notion splays one foot and then another on my outer ear, like a water strider, creeping into my head slowly, spreading a patte smear in my head as it altruistically squashes itself on my brain.

I hated a complete stranger. I hated a woman with no flaying tools or other personal treats I had witlessly passed to her. Reading about her life I couldn't help feeling angry. Things seemed so alive and vibrant in her eyes. Her pain, her bar/pub excavations for a good time, everything looked fucking beautiful, beautiful and unnecessary as a Plasma TV I can't help watching.

I felt inadequate, deeply inadequate, but moreso I felt envy, that completely unreasonable, instinctive envy that smacks you as your vision turns red. It was immediate. I adored it for how I hated it and especially how I hated her.

It had all been like a sonnet belched out a rectum. There she was, crossing the threshold of someone's arms and throwing the day away, to say however many loves in whatever many ways, incessantly, insipidly. Falling in love with that someone, hopelessly, tumultuously. The Earth is rent, the angels weep and the gods themselves vomit fanfare in crescendo. A love like toilet paper: intimately necessary for life, but regularly replaced.

In love, young love. An exulted state of fantasy that blinds one to abuse, neglect and whatever other sweet, soft, cankerous nettles plow over you like steel tumbleweeds. I'm not a hypocrite, though. I wanted what I thought she had, in such a childish and uncontrolled way that I surprised myself. And I thought: do I just want to throw myself at the feet of someone and hope they have nice shoes? Don't kick too often while they fuck someone, hell, somemany else?

No, I know I want equality of love: not IN love, but WITH love; not a farsical descent into a raging pit of gumdrops and high fructose magma, but passionate balance, somehow like you might imagine the single point of light was right before the Big Bang; hmm, celestial irony right there. Even so, I want that.

I hated her for the seeming perfection of that love, as if it were an item in the Grocer's freezer I'd merely overlooked in my idiocy.

And then I smiled. She was mad. A stark-raving, obsessive madcap! She confessed to it. It hadn't been 'in love' after all. Oh you can't imagine how happy I was when I read that. In the end it was pain: sweet, honest, plain pain. The ludicrous fantasy of being in love wasn't marred, just sortof detonated over and then, y'know, scrubbed really well.

I genuinely like the idea of being 'in love'...you'd be hard pressed to find a hopeless romantic as hopeless as I am...but I'm a Puritan at heart: you have to feel anguish, terror and above all lots of misery before getting a shot at being that selfless and being able to recognized a love that can be true. Without that pain, frankly, how can you tell a point of light from a roll of toilet paper?

Ah, happy at the misery of others. I was worried about myself for awhile.

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