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I reckon love is really confirmed in disgust. There comes a moment when the apple of your eye does something just absolutely hideous; rolls over to kiss you in the morning with Satan’s breath, says something a little mean about you at a party while you're standing right there, leaves the stench of shit in the bathroom unsuspectingly. And that is when love is either born or stillborn. The propagandised lover you’ve been sleeping with suddenly turns into a real, shitting person. In that moment you either plot a path out of the arrangement or give yourself over completely.
It's easy to forget, when picking up a shell or a fragment of sea glass, how long a journey it undertook to reach your hand, the pilgrimage, the currents it has been conveyed by, a life of salt and whimsy and time. But here it is now, on the beach, in your palm; a meteorite from the other direction. Was matter like that, for you? Formed in those initial few moments of time, condensed from energy into an is, flung out into the black, made into suns, pushed about by cosmic currents, by gravity's kiss, and baked finally into solar systems, into deserts, and forests, and fauna, and atmospheres,
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You took fourteen billion years to make, and you won't happen again. Your ghost is everywhere now.
Imagine, likewise, that death was abolished. Would there be anything left to fear? Would there be anything left to enjoy? Eating is dull without first being preceded by hunger. All spontaneity and risk would be empty without the constant looming cloud of death in the future-distance. Be glad Polly is gone for now. You'd never have loved her quite like this otherwise.
But if you can watch the myth die before your eyes, if you can accept that your lover is disgusting and petty at times, if you can accept this of everyone you ever meet, then everything will almost certainly be fine.
