I want to ask you to become my lover, but not in order to fulfill a love story.

“To govern love and make it entirely conform to my will is impossible.” And yet, we have arrived at such a time: nearly every form of emotion we have ever encountered has been carefully documented, dissected, and discussed. We can compare the many love stories we have heard, situate ourselves within certain narrative structures, and speculate endlessly about what our future might become.

And still, this is nothing more than a kind of self deception. When it comes to love, how futile all preparation is.

In Roland Barthes’s work, the lover is simply “the one who is in love.” Film criticism and reading groups, as practices that have existed for over a century, are only rarely preserved in the form of books. Through reading a classic of love such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, fragments of love are gathered and scattered at once. To collect them, to create randomness. In this moment, perhaps you need to hear these words, and yet the very same words may become irrelevant in the next.

Beyond love, there are always passing whispers. They brush against us, yet fail to stir the heart in the way that love does. Between these passing winds and our constant inner thoughts, which is more real? Do they exist at all? The evidence of feeling has the most elusive body. Each fleeting scene is like a single note that has slipped away from the melody.

To reach you where you are now, to provoke your inner dialogue and offer some measure of comfort, these fragments may intertwine with your own experiences. They become the basis through which you try to understand your present situation. Sometimes they work. More often, they do not. Occasionally, roles reverse, and you come to understand the other person’s state. That, too, can be a kind of consolation.

❝“Cuteness” is the trace left behind by exhaustion, a mark of helplessness.❞

Any moment in love can be given meaning. Its beginning, its development, its ending. From these causal links, intentions are inferred, and people construct love stories. But love stories belong to narration. They “submit to public opinion, and public opinion always diminishes excessive forces, compelling the lover to suppress their chaotic, aimless imagination, which runs free like an unbridled horse.”

So let us become lovers, without attempting to become the protagonists of a love story, and without trying to remain outside of it. Let us taste what it means to desire in this time: to truly experience the onset, the intensification, to feel both pain and joy, and then let it pass.

Now, I know what I once did not know.