Love is Automatic

Ellis Metzger

I have recently started exploring the surrealist practice of automatic writing. A practice in which you clear your mind and simply write: write whatever you are thinking, no stopping, no distractions, no judgements, unlock and explore your unconscious. 

Now I must admit, I have cheated a little in lieu of Valentine’s Day. I didn’t clear my mind, not one bit, but rather thought about that impossibly painful, searingly beautiful thing we call love. 

I’m not sure what the surrealists thought about love, but I guess that doesn’t really matter, I know what I think, and I suppose all of you will too. 

Happy (day before) Valentine’s Day xx.  

Automatic writing about love, or something of the sort: 

Love is the damp summer wind that wafts through the rusted hinges of our front door, quiet gusts that smell like dandelions and manure. It is the fox that we saw last winter, up on the ski slopes in New Hampshire, it hopped across the hills and canyons of the snow dusted ground, glowing violet in the moonlight. Love is the very thing you told me you hated when you kissed me on the ear for the first time. After that we ate biscuits in my bed and fucked on the crumb filled sheets. I dont know when I realized what love actually was, or if I even know now, but I guess I have to try. Love is the orca whale that you cried about when you read that article about SeaWorld. And the coral and the seaweed, all tangled in your sandy-wet hair. It formed little clumps, little worlds of their own, I think I could live in those worlds. All briney and fishy, all soft and cold and slimy, a hard peck of a dolphin or maybe a sea urchin, I can’t remember. I think what love really is, is the way you grabbed my hand on Kingda-Ka when I said I was too scared to go, but I went anyways, just for you, and my lips smelled like cotton candy and tasted like Corn Nuts, and you gripped onto my twisted fingers so hard you left little star-shaped marks. Love is the way the first rays of moon-shine feel on my skin when we go to the lake at night, naked and slippery, our blubbery bellies hanging over our shorts, but we don't care about that, I stopped caring when I realized what love was. When I realized that I could let my hand slip up the ridges on your spine and feel each vertebrae rumble under the soft pads of my fingers when you laugh in the smoky night air. I think I might love it all. I love the world and its little bugs that get stuck in my teeth when I hang my head out the window of your Honda Civic, and you are driving so crazy I think I might die, but that’s the fun of it. And I love it and I love you and I love living. Even when it gets so hard that all the spit in my cheek turns to blood and I cry those great big yellow-green tears that you warned me about when we first met. It stings my chin and makes my nose run, metallic and sharp like the shots the doctors gave me so long ago that I’m starting to forget. I think that might be what love is: that pain, that joy, that feeling when you put your fingers in my mouth and they taste like me and smell like you and I know that I will love you forever.