I am in love with the dead

I am in love with the dead, the dying, everything that is ugly. I dream of the weak and the starving and want them wrapped tightly in my arms until the last sigh of life is squeezed from their frail bodies. I love the wretched, I love the wronged, I love the destroyers of beautiful things and then I love those things they have destroyed. I long for flames at the flower’s base and for broken bottles all throughout the streets. I love all that is wrong and hurt and abused and marginalized – I love the sound of sirens and gun shots and bombs and crying and wailing and more than anything else in the world, I love the sight of a tear against the soft cheeks of usurped innocence.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t care, that it was all meaningless to me – more than that, I would betray myself, my truth, if I said that I did not love all that no one else will. It is that vulnerability in everything, its potential end, its movement away from its pristine origin, its fall from creation that pulls all of my being into it for those moments that it dies until I love it beyond any compensation of its originality. And all of this is no joy; yet it is a requirement of the senses, that each piercing cry of suffering course the void of space to rest in finality upon my ears; each distended belly, each bloodied corpse, landscape of paradise littered with the bodies of the once able, proud and alive beings, as those moments are trapped in each analog second that radiates its life with 10,000 trumpets as it hurls itself into nothingness, I collapse in humility before its courage and I worship it. I love them because I can not imagine my end without the same love, and I can therefore deny it no more than I can accept it.
It is love. There is no more or less than that and I bring it up only because I wonder what would happen if the whole world loved all that it doesn’t. I imagine great ceremonies going up for the summer’s crush of heat that puts the blooms of spring into last season. I imagine leaders of states falling over themselves to offer hospitality and kindness, recognizing their own destruction in the mirror of their guests’. I wonder if there would be states, merely languages that neighbors would heartily learn if only for sake of their dying and disgustingly wretched companions. I imagine mourning at a birth and a celebration at the death and in all of it, we’d stay cheery trying to make the last moments of each existence meaningful and satisfying until the final explosion into life. I imagine we are dead now, and will one day be alive.