Hi there internet. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Apparently I’m trying this whole ‘put a bunch of scattered ideas and notions into something resembling coherency’ thing again and here’s what came out first. Enjoy. Or don’t. It’s your screentime douchebag – do what you want with it.

The opposite of love has never been hate.

Once upon a time, a younger (and ergo, unwiser) me would have said that it was fear, but the grown up(ish) version has revised the theory somewhat. The latest rendition kind of came to me during a conversation about how so many of my favourite songs, those that just seem to dig into every fibre of my being like some kind of wayward organ coming home and reattaching itself to something vital inside my chest have the same, or at least similar chords. Yeah I know – it’s the ‘resonance’ thing, but that’ll be the only time I use the word, I promise. Besides, language does its thing and demonstrates these kind of ideas based on generations of contemporary conclusion. Do ‘Ring a bell’ or ‘Strike a chord’ ‘sound familiar’? Yeah, I thought so.

Right, on with it then.

So the opposite of love (I have decided in my supreme wisdom), is grief. Okay hold up now – before we get too much farther into this thing, you’re going to have to get up to speed on what exactly I mean by love. In a lot of ways, it’s kind of like autism. Yeah, I know. But still – pay attention.

The autism thing is (unqualified opinion caveat: “seems”) complicated, misunderstood and has the collected sciences scratching their boffinous heads in some way or another. There is one thing they tend to agree on however, that it is a spectrum of behaviour, upon which what we typically label as ‘autism’ sits, somewhere between aspergers and Mcauley Caulkin in ‘The Good Son’. Love? Exactly the same.

In Collin’s magical rainbow love spectrum, we can include the whole gamut of “OOH, ME LIKE” kind of emotional connection. <- Pay attention to that last word – it’ll be a recurring theme. So platonic friendship based on a mutual enjoyment of ferret hunting is a kind of (weird, but nonetheless) love. I’d consider this the weakish end of the spectrum, unless you both really, really like ferrets, in which case you could say it goes a little deeper. That compulsive, heart pounding, inexplicable “I’m going to tear all of your clothes off and bury myself inside your skin NOW before every blood cell in my body bursts into an auto-erogenous supernova of pure unadulterated desire I’d put somewhere toward the opposite end of that spectrum (Shutup, it happens. I’m told.) The deep kinship formed by lifelong friends and partners I’d seat in that solid (if terribly over-rated) normal/healthy/functional part of the spectrum and parent-child? Well, spit a clone through that whole damn thing and back out to and through the other side and you have a starting point for where that level of relativity begins.

Because really, that’s what it’s about isn’t it? Regardless of where on the spectrum two beings happen to sit, it’s how they relate to one another that defines where and how they meet. And paradoxically, how and where they meet on that spectrum goes on to define how exactly they relate. It’s a little metaphysical and really, really badly described but stick with it – I’m sure you’ll (ok, we’ll) find a point in here somewhere. The important bit is that the mechanics of attraction, reaction, repulsion and for want of a better term – emotional gravitation – remain the same. The players, and the contexts in which they move within this little biochemically fractal* environment change.

You click. You relate. You love. But this isn’t some static, vaccuumy environment we’re talking about here, this is life. The greatest fucking show on earth (to paraphrase Dawkins). Perhaps the object of your affection (which again, literally meaning ‘emotion, inclination, disposition; love, attraction, enthusiasm is in the grand scheme of things – well, this one anyway – contextually, a big deal) has changed. Perhaps you as an object upon that same relativistic scale of affection have changed. The change itself changes the relation within that tide of intrinsic emotional relations, one feeds the other, away or towards, hither, or thither. The objects change, so does the connection. The connection changes, so do the objects. Either way, your position on my little hypothetical rollercoaster of (somewhat badly described, for which I can only offer my apologies) emotive gravitational swell changes. Now assuming that, like most of us, you are a creature of habit, then that change will be at the very least a little difficult. There’s a natural resistance to the moving away bit for the safety of the emotional environment you’ve become comfortable with – that you’ve grown into. Some Darwin bloke postulated a similar thing a while ago about the passing on of certain physical traits that thrive in immediate environments. Evoluigi, or something. Anyway.

Grief.

Let’s say that you, or your counterpart has changed so much that that affection simply vanishes. It happened to me when they changed the seasoning on the KFC chips. Bastards. I got over it, but man – I miss those chips. Now, let’s scale up a bit and let’s say you lose – oh, I don’t know – the love of your life. Not the life itself, just the love bit. The object remains, but the relationship (or those objects within it) changes to a point where you simply feel… different. If that little survival switch is thrown, if for any of the plethora of reasons that are fired in such a situation you resist that change – enter grief.

Now let’s say for argument sake that grief is a spectrum of an intrinsically similar, yet exactly opposite nature to that of love. The closer the objects, or event perhaps (because I’m thinking the ‘opposite’ bit here means a switch to temporal, rather than spatial relations – or at the very least a symmetrical compensation of the two.) the more tightly bound the relationship between two points on that spectrum, the keener the grief. Time passes. People live their lives, the grief subsides. Antipodal – grief and love in this imagining are entwined, part of a self-regulating double-helix of human interplay. Feeding each other, and by each other’s hand fed.

When I was very young, I watched, and listened, as my best friend’s mother grieved her death. The sound of her keening was beyond mournful, like nothing I’d heard before, and like nothing I’ve heard since. It was a physical presence, this grief, an audible acknowledgement of the lack of someone – at once the most surreal, and most very, very frighteningly real thing I’d experienced in my young life. In much the same way, love achieves that same level of presence, be it [redacted for the sake of the less sexually comfortable amongst you and, let’s face it, a guy has to keep some secrets, right?] where the act itself becomes something tangible, something separate from the two bodies lying skin to skin, yet born of it.

And never, ever have I lived an experience more thick with emotional viscosity that when my first daughter was born. It was as if time slowed to a halt, the heartbeats of every person in that room pounded a staccato rhythm into my own chest, and every breath from every lung was mine to draw, ours to share. It was, and remains, the kind of thing that words alone cannot express. A subjective experience that like my friend’s mother’s grief, is wholly, entirely subjective***.

We have this tendency to moderate behaviour – socially, and individually – as if our lives, our society, and the world as we know it will scatter to dust if we cannot pinpoint and suitably fit every single life within it into some fanciful ideal of normalcy entirely irreconcilable to any accurate interpretation of the reality in which we live. To hell with that. This is life. Live it.

Love is about the connection. Grief; its loss.

In love, collide. Come together like the stars before you collided countless aeons ago to form the very earth on which you stand.

In grief, crumble. Don’t be afraid of collapse – no matter how many pieces you shatter into, you’ll come back together in the end.

And if you must sit somewhere in the middle, by choice or circumstance – either be prepared to come for the ride of your life as we zing on by, or get the hell out of our way.

* I do love to piss off teh scientists with made up terminology. No really – it’s pretty much what I live for**.

** Yeah, I know how sad that is. WAS I TALKING TO YOU?! SHUTUP AND GO BACK TO READING MY BRAINSPILL.

*** Yup, there’s a whole other comparison ripe for the making, and I ain’t touching it. Not this time, anyway.