L'amour comme dans les films

Marc Chagall – Lovers Above the City (1913–1914)

A love like this will not last forever. But perhaps some moments are so full, so luminous, that they can stretch across a lifetime — moments to experience, to endure, to recall until death itself becomes merely a door to memory. I first understood what love could be under the Sevillian sun, in a summer that seemed endless, when love lived not in experience but in the endless poems I devoured tirelessly. I tasted it also through the flickering promises of cinema — the kind of love that insists on a happily ever after, something so tangible, so irrevocable, so indelible that it stitched itself into the fabric of every story I imagined for my life. It was never fiction to me. It was the only truth. Life itself, I realized, was merely a fraction of the whole — an extension of something far more essential: the experience of love. To fall in love is to exist, and I understood then the quiet poetry of that revelation — to be fully seen, fully known, and yet loved not as a fleeting idea but as a living, breathing soul. To be loved is to be remembered — not only in presence but in absence, not only in what you are but in the invisible parts you leave behind.

Love, I believe, is as ancient as history itself — a written, unwritten, eternal promise of an unearthly connection. It is raw, it is violent in its urgency, it is truer than the sun that sets and rises without fail. I knew what to believe with the undoubtable certainty of a true believer — and with the trembling doubt of one, too. I knew that we are born to express the most aggressive, ungovernable shades of emotion — to love with the ferocity that death alone can silence. To love so rawly, so hungrily, that it feels as though we are eating the living light out of each other. Oh, to love.

To see the world not through your own eyes but through ours — to surrender your soul willingly, reverently. To accept your failures and your small defeats when you cannot overcome the inevitable friction of two separate beings trying desperately to merge. To grant the privilege of forgiveness — and the terrifying privilege to wound. No ego, no demands for conquest or submission — only the sacred offering of the self. To eat together, to nourish one another’s hungers — for food, for words, for meaning. To read the forgotten books on each other's shelves, to breathe life into forgotten dreams, to give your existence an intimate, personal significance.

To devour your darkness and still cradle your light. To do battle with your demons and to safeguard your angels. To build, stone by stone, a home tucked deep within the shadowy alleys of my heart — a place no one else will ever know. To want your goodness and your flaws in the same breath, without separation, without fear. To carve your name into the stones of the Roman Empire itself — not out of conquest, but out of devotion. To kiss your soul — not your mouth, not your skin, but your soul — before the music fades into silence.

I believe we can only perceive the potential of love as wide as the love we are willing to carry inside ourselves — as wide as the love we are brave enough to give away. It is in that very act of giving that we create our capacity to receive — to drink from the endless well of each other’s hearts. Oh, to love.