Love & Torment

With one touch, their entirety was set to flames, much like a match thrown into pools of fuel, they were two lovers destined to destroy each other. 

Why is it—that in love we choose to sabotage, that in daydreams we choose to hurt, that in their eyes we see an unconditional lover,  yet an unrelenting tormenter. Love is a simple word, but one must know that love is not just a word, it is a million unfixed feelings—minuscule pieces of glass, scattered and unable to be fixed together— because love is not meant to be one, it is meant to exist in fragments, in a thousand shards of glass, all with different sizes and edges, living separately in unison.  In simpler terms, love is every existing synonym to the six basic human emotions: sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. But at the end of the day, love is not a list of distinct words, it is a messy mixture of feelings one must experience with their heart, mind, and soul. Humanity will continue to make poor attempts at describing love as long as we exist, but we must accept that love was created only to be experienced, not to be described. 

With all of its complexities, it is easy to be confused with, which is why we often associate a lover with a tormentor. Why we intertwine love and hate, why we reconstruct communication into disputes, why we entangle a deep connection with  heartbreak, and closeness with conflict. We’ve tried so hard to actualize what love is that we began to measure it in ounces of negative experiences— the more real that love was, the more tragedies it withstood. This concept of “unconditional love” is something that is materialistic, something that is measured. 

We must learn to tread carefully when dabbling with love and torment— because love is of a flame igniting on a match, and torment is the fuel treading closer and closer to the fire, the second these two touch, love is engulfed in flames, and all that is left is a tormenting fire and malignant smoke. Love becomes sabotage, love becomes pain, and love becomes noxious—

If we were so unwavering to measure love, why did it have to be measured by toxicity?