Love, Like Water

Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.

But the water is not to blame. It only shows the shape of the problem, having surged to fill it. It is this negative space—this absence—that I need to understand.

And that’s the wonder and danger of love, isn’t it? We find ourselves overcome by other selves. New, strange urges. That’s why we often measure passion by the distance from which it takes us from our accepted self-concepts. Love reminds us of how little we know of our limits and how afraid we are of losing them. We are such porous creatures. We are

The living waters draw me back to their shores again and again. They seem to wish to show me that though they are ever changing, yet they never change. The ocean is both endlessly calm and disruptively turbulent, alternately quieting my own inner turmoil, while yet insistently warning me of the dark powers that lie unquiet beneath the water’s surfa