We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.

Nos queríamos con amor prematuro, con la violencia que a menudo destruye vidas adultas

The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved, was gone, but I kept looking for her - long after I had left my own childhood behind. The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal.

A love that took an early root, And had an early doom.

Stronger than lover's love is lover's hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make.

I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred

"What should we do?", I asked, and I had a pained feeling I thought was the beginning of love.
In those early months we clung to each other with a rather silly desperation, because, in spite of everything my mother or Mrs Jordan could say, there was nothing that really prevented us from seeing each other. With imagined tragedy hovering over us, we became inseparable, two halves creating the whole: yin and yang. I was victim to his hero. I was always in danger and he was always rescuing me. I would fall and he would lift me up. It was exhilarating and draining. The emotional effect of saving and being saved was addicting to both of us. And that, as much as anything we ever did in bed, was how we made love to each other: conjoined where my weaknesses needed protection.

I was filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage

They pursued their love with a wild abandon, unprotected against the treachery of the insecure foundation on which it was based and too young to bridge the gap that would suddenly and unexpectedly fling them miles apart.

First Memory

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was — for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

So young when the pain had begun Now forever afraid of being loved.

Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.

He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless.... I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.