Luiza Valdez

“i’ll take care of you.” “it’s rotten work” “not to me, not of it’s you” -euripides

“it’s not the whole truth. the whole truth is i am in love with him still” -if we were villians, m.l. rio

“if anyone does not believe in venus they should gaze at my girlfriend” -unknown

“heaven help a fool who falls in love” -ophelia, the lumineers

“i will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong” -lemony snicket

“the world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. the curves of your lips rewrite history” -oscar wilde

“but loving you is a good problem to have” -monster, adventure time

“life is the flower for which love is the honey” -byron

“i know the world's a broken bone, but melt your headaches, call it home” -panic! at the disco, northern downpour

“where you go i’m going so jump and i’m jumping” -achilles come down, gang of youths

“i can take care of myself just fine. all right?” “no” “what do you mean no?” “no” -dead poets society

because I have always thought of love as the act of conceding, a consent to obliviousness: “the acceptable mutual ignorance of a union.” the need to understand the impermeable boundary line between our perceptions of the person we love and the actual people casting such shadows. but maybe the only boundary between love and death is skin.

the skeleton lovers intwined for centuries have nothing keeping their carbon apart, and maybe that’s the secret none of us have considered: time is all that’s needed to break down the barriers of independent experience. familiarization, naturalization, saturation. cream swirling into coffee. there’s a reason the most romantic poem i’ve ever read is just these four lines; “so I love you because I know no other way / than this: where I does not exist, nor you, / so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, / so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

The Need to Stay