Love Is a Car Crash
A Poem
To love someone is firstly to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you. —Billy-Ray Belcour
Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way. —Franz Kafka
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. —Louise Erdrich
Above: In order to experience love, you must first experience death.
Love is not earned or won,
Love is a car crash just waiting to happen.
Time slows down—
And when you realize what’s happening,
It’s too late.
Fate is in motion; the accident has begun.
It’s messy.
It hurts.
It leaves a mark.
No one is at fault—
Each party bears some blame,
For the emergent chaos, escaped from within.
Whether driver or passenger or bystander,
You don’t want to watch, but you just can’t look away.
The danger is invigorating, the frenzy intoxicating.
When two souls collide at high speed,
Wreckage ensues and debris embeds.
Collateral damage is necessary when two become
One.
Feelings lodge deep like shrapnel.
To pull them out would be suicide—
Too much blood lost far too quickly.
This is no minor scrape,
It’s a crash that leaves no one alive.
The history of love is a graveyard,
Full of corpses, littered with wreckage,
And somehow gorgeous.
After all, flowers only bloom from dead things:
Waste made compost from past crashes.
Before you floor it, buckle up.
In the ruins you can piece yourself together,
But you’ll never be whole again.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.
With sincere gratitude,
Tom
"When two souls collide at high speed" is my favorite part. Love always feels like something you fell into. By the time you realize you've fallen into it, you've already reached the event horizon. A little part of you dies to make room for the new soul latching onto you--just as you latch onto them. Or is it more so that there was a part of you that was already missing and you didn't even know it? Like a little emptiness left you behind the moment you locked eyes with them. So maybe love is less like falling into a black hole and more like being pulled out of one--just when you were getting used to the darkness.