If you are going to love, love out of all reason and beyond all sanity.

Love so that it feels to you that your life is tied inexorably to another’s, and so their pain is yours, their hatred your hatred, their lies your lies also.

Love another like you love time, how you track the passing of it even in unconscious sleep, how you fret it always and can feel it eluding you and passing off to some place beyond, which is terrifying, and to which you yourself will one day go.

Love in the way you unconscionably love failure, how you crave it because it makes you feel that certain human pain which no other animal can feel, because to them failure only means one outcome, death, and to them time is meaningless but for the movement of the sun and its exchange with the moon, and then back again.

Love another in the way you hate yourself. Even those who love themselves only do so from the perspective of others who themselves hate themselves and who wished they possessed everything in their view which is not them.

But they do not know what it means to be another person, because empathy is ludicrous and contradictory and impossible, and even if it wasn’t, if one person could truly understand what it means to be another, they would stun themselves into outrage at the learned fact that they are the same as every other, that god, if his hand was responsible for this cesspool of souls and bodies of which we’re a part, created all of this with little discernment, and practiced no prudence but to change all the faces and skins, and to keep the inner worlds as duplicates of one another.

As it turns out that was enough.

Love another as you love your mother’s scent.

Love another in the way a dog will eat from the hand of whoever feeds it.