Temporary Madness

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The Neopop Dialogues - by Daniel Mena

I was a strange child. Even from a young age, I had realized the difference between love and lust. Perhaps it was due to all the reading; I fooled myself by believing I was on the fast-track of life, immersed in the words and thoughts of hundreds of others far wiser than I, and thinking that I did not need the experiences to reinvent the wheel when I could just take it, secure a seat on it, and wobble away on my unicycle. And, well, I had my shares of tumbles and scrapes—but I did at least have a unicycle. It was my bedrock against life’s earthquakes. You fall; you flap your arms again; you fly.

One quote from those millions of pages has stood out to me for years, a beacon of truth in a churning sea of perceptions. Old-fashioned, quaint, and yet ever so timeless, I’d found it in the musty depths of Corelli’s Mandolin. It has haunted me since then, like a tender invisible little Jiminy Cricket to perch on my shoulder and whisper in my ear.

Love—the old Greek doctor told his daughter, as he realized she was falling for an Italian soldier occupying their WWII-ravaged island of Cephalonia—is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body […] That is just being “in love,” which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Remember, even amidst the earthquakes. Savor it, amidst the temporary madnessess and the breathlessness.

And when the madness subsides, you know the best is yet to come.

"Angreek87"