Dear Reader,

Congratulations on finding this page. Aside from this tab, you might have discovered by now that there are secret pages not located on the navigation menu and hidden links on this website. These typically lead to little stories, poems, old images, and bits of music. Sometimes the tab you are reading contains passwords to protected posts. Right now, it just contains a love story.

When I was very small, I was given a little packet of sea creatures. This was before I grew to be disinterested in pets, which my mother never allowed me to have, and subsequently I accepted the tiny life forms with more tenderness than I thought possible for my heart to muster. I closely examined the drawings before I opened the packet, and, at the age of six, gave myself fully to the belief that it contained little humanoid beings, as depicted. (In reality, of course, it was only brine shrimp.)

But I was too young, and there were no adults to help me;—my mother would have been horrified at the idea of a pool of sea creatures lying around the house, and the “other adult” was constantly trying to throw me off a balcony, complete blows to my bones until I couldn’t move, or otherwise creatively utilize a kitchen knife to compel me to perfectionism. And so, left alone, I fished around for the prettiest clear open container I could find and filled it with water, slid the eggs from the packet into a new aquatic home, placed the container near a window, and then made a fatal mistake. Ripping open the sachet of nutrients, I adoringly dumped half of its contents into the water. When, in a couple of hours, the sea-things did not spring from their eggs as promised, I concluded anxiously that I had not fed them enough, and unloaded the sachet in its entirety.

The water was essentially polluted. The eggs couldn’t hatch. If any did, the creature had certainly died instantly, unable to breathe.

It was supposed to be a pinch. Initially just a pinch of the contents in the satchel.

In the next two days, I came to realize my mistake. I looked into the murky green water and sensed that something within its opaque depths had become a tossing corpse. The unfathomable sea monster of my most enrapturing nightmares was growing in my bedroom, full of bones and small brine shrimp children.

In shock that I had killed something, (I had killed something!) I held the bowl-shaped container against me as though it were an open womb. And I began to cry very quietly until my mother, entering my room unannounced as one does with children, pried the thing concernedly from my hands and washed the dead sea creatures away.

I watched her, stoic with dried tears. There was no one to tell me the moral of the story, but I had learned it. I was dangerous. I was, in fact, dangerous specifically when I was in love. Overeager to nourish the sea creatures, I had killed them with love. My passion was scorching. Love, the overwhelming emotion I felt when given the tiny sea-things, was a powerful and wild thing whose magnitudes needed to be suppressed. Regulated, controlled, measured, as to not harm the living creature on the other side.

And standing on tiptoes at the age of six, clinging to the fabric of my mother’s clothes as she rid of the evidence, I would be remember the lesson for the rest of my life.

So that, years later, when I fell in love again, I would, with the utmost caution, know the meaning of impending loss.

But, dear reader, this is no cautionary tale. It is not to demonstrate a cynicism toward love, because love is All There Is. I have told you this to emphasize the importance of consent… of understanding consent. We cannot make assumptions of the needs and desires of whom we love, or else we will certainly turn dangerous. We must constantly feel the way they change, the transformative dimensions that revolve slowly within them in a kaleidoscope of identity and want.

And that gentility… is the rushing marvel of love.