Make Sure You Found Me First

Love me unconditionally, they say, as though this is the highest order of devotion. How grotesque. What is love without understanding but affection lobbed blindly over a wall? A participation trophy for existing. You need not know me, apparently. Need not comprehend the machinery, trace the wiring, or even correctly identify what you are looking at. Just love it. Whatever it is.

What exactly are you loving, then?

A silhouette, perhaps. Some crude approximation of me assembled from the pieces you found easiest to understand. Close enough, apparently. Affection requires remarkably little due diligence.

Understanding is less charitable.

I want to be torn apart.

Crack open my ribs and climb inside. Pull everything out. Turn each wet and ugly piece over in your hands and ask me what the fuck I thought it was doing there. Find the things I have swallowed whole and make me choke them back up. Peel away every explanation I have lacquered over myself until there is nothing left between your hands and whatever raw fucking thing has been hiding underneath.

And dare me to do the same to you.

I do not want us to handle each other gently. I want mutual vivisection. I want to know what remains of us when we have picked each other clean, gnawed the meat from every convenient explanation and sucked the marrow from every lie we told ourselves because truth was harder to digest.

Maybe nothing survives.

So be it.

Love me unconditionally? How cheap.

Understand me inexhaustibly.

Come hungry. Stay hungry.