I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

I don’t like that smell,” Julian says quietly. If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.

The devil stole into the Garden of Eden.

He carried with him the disease— amor deliria nervosa —

in the form of a seed. It grew and flowered into a

magnificent apple tree, which bore apples as bright as blood.

This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love.

A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes. [...]

That’s the thing: We didn’t really care. A world without love is also a world without stakes. [...]

In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.

For all the people who have infected me with amor deliria nervosa in the past
- you know who you are.
For the people who will infect me in the future
- I can't wait to see who you'll be.
And in both cases:
Thank you.

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.
But the cure works differently for everybody; and it does not work perfectly for all.