Thoughts on love from Remus Lupin circa March of 1995.
The way he curves his tongue against my collarbone is dark magic, tingling and heady. His lips are the flesh of exotic fruits I've never tasted. His skin is rich and salty. He is a black shadow of blood-rush and intoxication that fits against my body, presses me down into the damp earth behind the house, into the purple settling silence of the twilight, into the humid air and the fade-in on a black canvas littered with stars, into the place from whence he came. Naked skin and thick, pulling muscle, our bodies are helpless creatures undone by friction and sweat and saliva. I feel his teeth in my skin, his tongue in my mouth, his hair in my eyes, his heart in my ears, his voice in my brain, his breath in my bones.
We kiss, slow and hard. We writhe, hard and trembling. We breathe, trembling and fast. He is a rough and deadly thing. He is a stray dog that will bite off your hand as you offer him table scraps. He is dangerous, a knife pressed sharp against my throat with a blade made of love and lust that shines like his most charming smile. And I want him in my blood. I want him like a disease that will eat away my organs, chew on my tendons, my ever-failing mind, and destroy my insides. I want him and he is cancer.
I once heard losing love was like an autopsy—you awaken to find yourself split open, heart-to-groin. You stare at your insides but you don't recognize them, because you never knew what you were made of until you saw it so raw and bloodied. You press your two halves together and you wait for the cut to close, but it never does, not entirely. It will always be a weak-seal. It will always be a fault line.
Love is nothing like that. You cannot lose love, excise it like a tumour; love lingers and goes bad. Love is a butcher shop, all meat and ligaments and the hearts of beautiful things on hooks in the window. It's the contamination, the spoiling insects that crawl inside when you're not watching, until there is no clean cut to stitch up, just a decaying, spoiled carcass that was once a living, loving body. Love infects you, tunnels through you like maggots and worms, leaves you rotted and ruined.
God, I've always loved him. I was always willing to let him into my veins. When we were young, I loved him sweetly, cleanly, with such ease that is sickens me. No, no, that was not love. That was happiness. I've come to believe that the two are mutually exclusive.
When we were soldiers, I loved him secretly. I loved him in dark corners, and in the ragged breaths we could never catch. I loved him like there was no tomorrow, and, of course, there wasn't.
When he was gone, I loved him like a severed limb. I hated him so fiercely that it felt like love and I loved him so hard that it felt like dying. I loved him viciously and without sanity or conscience or sense. I loved him like the wolf loves the moon.
Now, I love him like falling off a cliff. I love him without hope or self-protection. Without arms flung out to catch myself. I love him like this because I know there is no other way left to love, I've tried them all. He is inside me and beside me and all around me and I am falling, falling, falling, and I am only too relieved to go. Our lack of tomorrows doesn't frighten me anymore, because this time I know better than to limp away from the wreckage. This time the end, when it arrives, will be closure.