a new beginning

There was a time when I used to live with degrees of dislike. Exclusively.

I met those whom I disliked less. I spent an hour or two more with those whom I disliked lesser. It worked fine. Until love came knocking.

Love wakes you up. You don't always wake up shining and bright. Sometimes love wakes you up on a gloomy night. Moonless. That is how I woke up on a moonless night. With love.

You don't dislike the one you love: it may be a city, a thing, a person, a dog, a piece of much-used clothing. But you learn to hate it. It is the heart's survival mechanism: to learn to hate the one you love because it will burst with too much of too much if it keeps pumping love in and out.

Dislike and hatred are different catalysts. One is deadening, the other is inciting.

So the day I fell in love I stopped working with degrees of dislike and started working with degrees of hatred.

It is a different life. More difficult. But I feel alive.

People will do anything to feel alive. Mostly they will chase: dreams, women, wealth, freedom. Because what you chase, chases you back, and it's a nice game. Enough for a lifetime.

It's a vague thing I am chasing right now. But we will figure out.

That is what this story is for.

I used to be a Jew. Now I am faithless. Or rather too full of faith--I have faith in invisible rains gods, idols--bronze idols in particular, and women, or rather their bodies--you can have epiphanies if you know how to read their curves, and strange scripts which I do not know how to read. And chants which I do not understand. And loves which refuse to make themselves clear to me--remember, I told you, it is a vague thing that I am chasing.