Chapter Text
Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love’s value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can ‘surmount,’ without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency. I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again.
― A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
Author’s note: Welcome to «Love». You can read this story in many ways, from beginning to end, from end to beginning, in alphabetical order, in chronological order, randomly picking chapters, or in whichever order you’d like. You can explore, dismember and reconstruct it as you please. Of course, there’s a logical order to it but it’s up to you, dear reader, to discover that. Above all things, this is a love story or that’s the term that fits it the most, it can be also called a story about love; it can be an ode, a piece of poetry, a letter, or maybe a puzzle but underneath it all, it’s a story. Their story.