- 10 min read

The Story of Love

by Alyza Taguilaso

First published in Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing in English in March 2011. Click the arrow (>) to learn more about this piece.

begins with an explosion.

My great-great-grandparents were making love and the First World War decided to happen. Later, after finding out news of the nearby barrio blown into a million pieces, they were frantic for penance. They called to their gods, offering shrapnel, offering prayer and the white ashes of saints, thinking people died because of how much we loved each other.

It meant: they would forever equate love with guilt. It meant: they would never be able to control it. They had 24 children, 12 of which died in sickness or childbirth.

Their children grow up. Another war stirs in a distant continent, spitting out seeds of smoke. Smoke: eventually spreading its feet to our native soil – the thick scent of despair blooming in people’s nostrils as they ran from the cities (held vacant save for ash, bone, and parcels of paper carried off by wind, discoloring the horizon).

The world sees for the first time another face of sadness (i.e., the strangely shaped clouds planting themselves in the sky, turning rice fields into deserts, turning people into names remembered in prayer, turning home into where?, or seeing your son split, splintered into a million pieces before you can even exclaim No!) and suddenly everyone is determined to go into outer space, seeking the promise of landscapes untouched by missiles.

In a class on animal physiology I was taught: what we know of love is governed by the hormones vasopressin and oxytocin. The act of frequently caressing each other sends particular signals to the brain. The signals tell you: this is pleasure, this is what it means to be happy, and, yes, it is good; yes, more please. This is why people sometimes feel the need to touch themselves.

How strange: Realizing that what everyone wishes to capture is somewhere within our own bodies, and yet –

Stranger, still: A million dissections and experiments and tragedies later, we have no clear answers to why people fall in love. When someone says I have an answer, on the question of falling in love, someone else jumps up and says I have an answer.

I think that we like answers so much that we forget what it means to ask questions.

Like this one: what will it take to make you fall in love with me?

I have many secrets and I dress them up in the paling remains of saints, wear them through my teeth. I will trade you 7 secrets if you will tell me what it will take to make you fall in love with me.

My mother keeps a single secret: she cries once every 3 years. Each time I caught her crying I became more convinced that she discovered a way to measure sadness. I never asked mom why she cried. It’s something daughters know. Mothers and crying. Mothers, crying.

When I was 14 a girl told me she loved me and asked if she could kiss me. She wasn’t beautiful, but I liked the slant of her shoulders. I said No, not because I didn’t want to kiss her but because I didn’t want her. I was 14; I was sure I knew the difference between Yes and No. Like cat and dog. It took a few years later to realize what No meant. The second boy I loved said No when I asked to hold his hand. Children learn to say No before they say Yes. If so, then: why isn’t No any easier to bear? Do we measure happiness by comparing it to the number of times we’ve felt sad?

I remember his hands: his perfectly molded hands. Slender fingers forming a hook, pulling at my chest each time.

(I am a fish with my chest sliced open. I am a mermaid learning to swim.)

He played the piano with such grace, leading the dust gathered on its keys into dancing.

Charles Dickens said: accidents will occur.

I believe this is untrue.

Planets follow the most precise of motions.
People are governed by gravity.

During the Second World War, it was said that the Japanese hid bombs beneath bodies of the dead. The subtlest of traps: stringing in hapless soldiers who came to collect their fallen comrades, setting triggers firing like neurons upon touch – upon the slightest of movements – muting the possibility of any human sound within miles. Shunting anything that calls forth immediacy.

How strange: our bodies, how they betray us,

how they draw us towards other bodies.

Many lonely physicists spent sleepless nights finding the perfect formula for the atomic bomb. I am convinced that because people cannot contain love, they find a million ways to destroy themselves. Ask my cousin. He killed himself 3 years ago. I can’t remember his name. We weren’t close. They said he did it because his wife was leaving.

My great-grandfather was the eldest of 12 surviving children. When he was young, his father gave him a gun to protect himself. When he was older, he killed 3 people with it: a single bullet each, piercing the cavities of their bodies, avid for the position occupied by their hearts.

When asked why he did it, he replied in a voice fresh and certain with the smell of gunpowder: I have an answer.

Another thing science taught me: 83% of dust is made from human skin. The more we touch each other, the greater the chances of dust gathering at our feet. This is probably why mother forbade visitors from coming over after father left – it would take a long time to sweep memories of him away.

Why people keep dead things in museums: we like to keep what was in the past but we avoid anything that tells of passing.

Some people think this is how we first learn to love: wanting, without the necessary pains:

A butterfly is mounted on a case.
Sculpted miniatures of the solar system hang lulling in stillness from a perfectly constructed mobile.
The exoskeleton of a dinosaur is trying to tell us something: some things had to die so people would exist.
Somewhere, in the museum a child dares to touch what is on display, even when the sign says No.

The bible was written in increments. Centuries, patiently letting dust gather around the letters. Before that people relied on their mouths to remember. When mouths started getting filled with what would later be called kisses, they had to resort to other body parts. Meaning: hands.

The world was young and so were our bodies. We had so much time to learn about secrets (i.e., how particles in the air allow us to perceive the beauty of a sunset; how the sky is limited; why people can’t fly; angels, how they are made of light).

So calligraphy, the art of controlling mind so it slows to the pace of hand, was invented. Leaf, parchment, skin – the desire to capture yielded an explosion of canvasses, of empty spaces and voids we had to fill with ourselves. As if the world said: Yes, you may leave your mark now.

Vincent van Gogh cut off his left ear and gave it to a prostitute, saying Keep this as you would a treasure. How must she have felt, that girl? Inconsequential as an atom in his lonely universe of sycamores, sunflowers, and starry, starry nights and yet –

Is it always necessary for people to give parts of themselves away?

Later, realizing he could no longer wield a brush, he was said to have wandered into one of the many fields he had often painted and swiftly shot himself in the chest. The bullet missed his heart but caused enough injury to kill him 2 days later. Legend says his last words were

La tristesse durera toujours

This sadness will last forever.

I have a theory: people are born empty – heavy hearts yearning for something to fill its vessels. A long time ago, everyone was beginning to understand what it meant to love, a single mistake at a time – a birthday forgotten, a word that should have been unsaid, speaking too much of the truth – yet always the same question. Someone said it was more interesting than a horde of miracles: a celestial body of human desires giving birth to the first of blasphemies.

People soon realized that they needed a point of reference for love. Something was needed to fill the void –

Figure 1: God.

Figure 2: Somewhere: there is an apple, red and ripe.

It falls from the tree without effort and without so much as making a sound, plants itself on the head of a man who wanted to understand the world. Immediately he realizes I have an answer. It is not love, but it certainly felt like it.

On July 5, 1687, the world first learns of gravity.

323 years later, we are still trying to understand it.

If I come close enough for you to touch, and if I promise you:

my body will welcome the uncertainty of your fingers,

would you reach out?

I do not envy the planets or the stars. Those giants clothed with the makings of beauty, strings of light sewing the buttons of the universe – patching seams of nebulae upon red giants upon supernova, yet too easily they give their bodies up to distance.

Legend says Adam remembered the taste of the apple before the Lord took him back, erasing the stain that was sin.

Is that what it means to be loved:

turn to dust; forget what it means

to be the first to love? Be

without a body? Eve lived longer and was filled

with longing; she kept the apple

beside her. Each night she would smell it, take

tiny bites, reminding herself of Adam’s tongue

(that first hesitant kiss)

keeping the taste of what he had struggled all his life

to forget: the first of sins.

In the Book of Numbers, it is said: one who touches

the body of the dead will be unclean unless he takes the ashes

of a red heifer and someone sprinkles holy water

upon his unholy head. Remember: you will return to dust.

The Chinese believe in burning miniatures – houses, cars, money – sending it off to their deceased loved ones, passing dust-strewn messages into the afterlife – reminding the dead: You are loved and sorely missed, but also: you are dust, and all you will be given is dust.

This prevents the dead from turning into ghosts: figments of people we loved who now terrify us.

Consider: how ashes cannot escape from water.

This is how the Hindu keep track

of their dead, containing them

in sacred bodies of water so the dead remain voiceless

in their passage to another body, another life: the motions

of water being the only witness.

They say that love exerts the same force on our bodies as fear.

This means our bodies are telling us that being terrified and in love are one and the same:

Pupils dilating
Palms wet with sweat
Hearts skipping beats more than it should

When I think of love and fear I think of mom and dad. One day dad woke up and realized what he loved: himself; his need for other women. Mom modified her affections: they argued more, threw things around: porcelain, furniture, books, picture frames all thrown off their fixed orbits, shattering the axis on which our tiny world spun. She disguised her love as wreckage. Women never say what they mean. What she probably meant when she said you’re a monster was:

why can’t you love me anymore?

When grandmother found she had cancer, she asked why.

No one had an answer, not even her body.

When she was dying, she asked to be turned to ash.

She died, I started writing.

The dictionary is the only place where answer comes before question. It makes for a great joke, but no one laughs at this. Biology offers a lot of explanations: a squid has 3 hearts. You have one heart, quartered perfectly to accommodate your body. Why do you act like you deserve more?

Look at the sky: it never complains how things it is made to contain destroy it.

We all have holes in us. In anatomy it is called coelom.

This means: it is natural to feel alone.

When you are swimming near a reef and the water feels warm, that means the corals are making love, cooing to each other in voices more fluid than water. A caveat: nothing in the sea knows how to love. That is why the sea is sometimes so dark, and waves find it necessary to crash against each other again and again, crushing reefs into particles of sand, offering to the land what little it knows of human desires.

Water cannot hurt itself.

We invented mermaids to forget this – wanting

something to complete what was already wet and soft

and almost perfect.

Mermaids:

girls who can’t walk, who will not run away.

But mermaids are difficult to feed: their diet consists of eating people.

For this reason we keep pet fish.

What this says about us:

we only want what we can

contain, what we think

we can live with.

Imagine how the universe feels. Containing us and our ridiculous search for love. The universe does not have a void – it is a void in itself. We are alive in this massive, empty cavity and yet I attach meaning to everything you do. The universe never asked anyone for an explanation.

I am now going to tell you how I don’t think it’s possible to explain how much I love you.

The first time we met was in a cramped room. I couldn’t catch the sound of your name; I was afraid to ask you questions. Later on you told me: how you knew me from a year ago, a stranger whose face stuck to your memory. I said you were funny. You didn’t find that amusing, but I could tell you liked my laughter. I thought you were sweet (on most days), but I never told you. Women never mean what they say.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t love you.

I don’t love anyone.

I just like thinking about how your hands held my shoulders, trying to keep me

when I said No.

All I wanted to find out was: how much you wanted me.

Or, maybe: how much I wanted you.

I would like to know what it will take to make you fall in love with me.

Someday we will both be parts of stars – all cosmic dust and dissolved memories. How sad that when we are closest we cannot even feel it. Today I try my best to plant fingerprints all over you. I do this so that when my face fades and my fingers stop their curious strokes, your skin – the first to become dust – will be familiar with me. Then, I will be free to imagine us as juggernauts – floating through the atoms of our memories, crushing the weight of these passed centuries, piling the ashes of everything we’ve burned in our desire, in our awakening.

I will have left you with more than enough.

Alyza Taguilaso is a resident doctor training in General Surgery from the Philippines. Her work has been nominated for a Rhysling Award. Her poems have also been shortlisted for contests like the Manchester Poetry Prize and Bridport Poetry Prize, and have been published in several publications, including Electric Literature, Crazy Horse, The Deadlands, Canthius, Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Orbis Journal, Voice and Verse, and Luna Journal PH, among others. You may find her online via wordpress (@alyzataguilastorm), instagram (@ventral), and twitter (@lalalalalalyza).

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