When He Gets Under Your Skin

This post falls under the Manola Blablablanik series.


Some people will tell you that love is a social contract. Others will tell you it’s a disease rife with melancholy and heartbreak. And yet others will tell you that, if done right with copious hard work, it’s a panacea.

Everything I just mentioned above is the biggest bullshit, because love is all that and yet it isn't all that.

A contradiction. Yes, I know.

If two people unite their bodies, make commitments to their souls, then "love" become a virus you can’t get rid of easily when someone goes away. This is love on a cellular level.

A friend of mine recently said, “love doesn’t know time.” And that’s true.

There’s “clock” time and then there’s “soul” and “love” time.

When you truly love someone profoundly, that love does get under your skin. I’m not a scientist, but I would venture as far to guess that it probably transforms mitochondria. Two patterns of DNA come together, for better or worse.

And why the worse? Who wrote that shitty, negative vow? It should always be for the better.

Our hearts aren't kept in tight, bound boxes.  They spiral and cross boundaries, like the DNA helix, whirling and creating amazing shapes and possibilities.  Love doesn't just end; sometimes, unfortunately, it stays inside, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

One of my favorite lines from The English Patient is from character Katherine Clifton’s notebook: “tastes we have swallowed, bodies we've entered and swum up like rivers.”

Intimacy requires this incredible journey, fishing for comfort and solace in the heart, up dark, scary rivers, hiking on a body full of hair and bumps, of smells and holes and vulnerability, all beautiful, binding and incredibly annoying when regular life kicks in, constantly shifting from the banal to the sacred, back and forth.

Finding the highest gift of all -- to love someone, to love yourself and be present for a greater good as a couple made up of two individuals -- all that in communion with the body of another, all that in mutual adoration and respect.

Tonight, as I write this, the clouds float slowly and gently through the pale blue sky. But love, to me, without you in a state of embrace, it’s as if the soft vapor was sandpaper grating my skin.