Dante spoke of it like an engine—the love that moves the sun and the other stars. But he wrote it from a desk, wrapped in velvet, his hands safe from the frost. He didn’t know the grease and the grit of it. He didn’t know how a heart can tighten inside the chest like a clenched fist, turning every pulse into a small, frantic execution.

I look up at the ceiling at three in the morning, listening to the radiator hiss like a caged adder. The plaster is peeling in thin, papery flakes, just like the skin on my shoulders after a summer spent staring too long at the blinding white of the sun. People call it romantic. They want a domestic sort of warmth, a teacup held with both hands, steam rising into a polite kitchen.

I want the violence of the cosmos.
I want a love that carves me open with a sterilized scalpel and names every dark, secret thing it finds inside. A love that does not whisper sweet nothings across a pillow, but shrieks like a siren when the atmosphere tears apart. If it cannot move the stars, if it cannot tilt the earth off its stubborn axis and hurl us both into a freezing, silent void, then it is merely a habit, and I refuse to be anyone’s habit.

Let the heavens collide. Let the meteors burn themselves to ash against our ribs. I would rather be struck dead by the fierce, white-hot lightning of a real devotion than suffocate slowly in the lukewarm oxygen of almost.

© Beatriz Esmer