Part 2

You Are The Atrocity

I am so in love with this unbelievably beautiful woman. So ‘in love’.  And that is an important distinction to make at this juncture. There is a fundamental difference between ‘loving’ someone and being ‘in love’. It is possible to conceive of loving an animal, a pet perhaps, maybe a little yappy dog with an exuberantly wet nose or a loyal goldfish called Colin. Being ‘in love’ is an entirely different phenomenon all together. It is something that can, paradoxically, be both ethereal and excruciating. It can be, simultaneously, beyond the delirious, quixotic realms of comprehension and also so basically and intestinally human, it can cause brutal crushing pain, like a chisel snapping a shinbone.

The way humans flagrantly mistreat being in love is like taking a shit and then smearing it on an opulent golden throne surrounded by angels with fiery, luminescent wings. The angels won’t stop crying because of us, we are to blame for their tears. How easily something so unearthly and flawless can be infected and distempered by humans and their insignificant and trivial sufferings. Life is simple; it is people that make it complicated.

I think you only know when you are in love when you really feel it; you can sense it in every piece of bone and tendon taught and quivering like a wire. It is a self-evident, intrinsically irrefutable sensation in the depths of your moist guts and intestinal juices. It is like an element of your molecular structure, or flowing rampant in your bloodstream, it is like a chemical that has become such a part of you that it has wound its way into your nervous system. It has threaded its way through your ribcage and around your spinal column like a tumour, it has become an impulse, an incontrovertible instinct within you, it is like your heartbeat: rhythmic and incessant. It has become your DNA.

This woman, this unknown entity from the bus stop. She is the most incredible thing my dull, insensitive eyes have ever seen. I want to get to know every single inch of her body, I want to taste her naked skin, even the obscure, weird bits like the backs of her knees and her shin bones and the curve at the base of her labyrinthine spine. I want to develop a personal relationship with every one of the tiny golden hairs on the surface of her arms, I want to taste every last miniscule molecule of her being; I want to dissolve her skin in water and drink deeply from her and then feel her warm essence flowing within me.

And the creepiest thing is that I don’t even know her name. I have never spoken to her; I just admire her beauty from a distance, usually hiding behind my morning newspaper. This of course was when I was an upstanding member of society when I had the unflinching devotion to work part time in a newsagent’s across from my flat. But I would get up early, put on a rather shabby suit and pretend I was a member of the elite commuters on a frosty morning, just in order to fit in and watch her, salivating. We just seem to share an unspoken bond. There is an intrigue there that I can’t explain as we share the occasional awkward smile, just a fluctuating vibration that we are somehow inextricably linked, that our paths will intersect at some point in the near future and this woman will have some profound impact or influence on my life. Perhaps I have finally found her, my glowing guiding light.