Portents.

I am always eager for portents, and they pointed to us re-writing the very definition of love itself.

This would be the emotional equivalent of having the boldness to write down the first irrational number; proving that the ether does not exist; banishing the phlogiston.

The three ideas above - the denial of irrationals, and the promotion of the ether and phlogiston - were once so self-evidently true that I don’t imagine many people bothered to question them. History judges, of course, that the collective truth was wrong.

Bluefish and I were going to write the fundamentals of love, splitting its atoms, sequencing its DNA, discovering its periodic table and then extending it artificially. We knew this - it was irrefutable - because the signs told us so.

What more clap of thunder could any pair need than for one to unmask the other’s greatest fear in their first conversation? Out of the December umbra, the word ‘autism’ cleaved the morning, and the game I’d played for 30 years was up.

Portents - an Australian girl coming to the street named after an Australian city: how could such a synthesis ever result in failure? Portents - I may well be autistic, but I bleed words when I set my mind towards you. Picking relentlessly at the gaping maw of the wound you made on the night you arrived, I never gave it the chance to heal. Portents - your gentle face fixing the boundaries of your webcam in communication of the incommunicable. Portents - in Geneva, in Bratislava, in Budapest, in Vienna.

Like scientists, our destiny was to lever ourselves up onto the shoulders of that which had been before and, suspending our disbelief, rewrite it properly, with our own names on it. A treatise of love, complete with a lifetime of empirical evidence to back it up. If either of us were ever going to acheive anything, it would be such a document.

Now, less than a year later, the theory has not been so much challenged and revised, more obliterated and proven to be false to its very bones. The one who staked his future on it being the truth is exposed as a Newtonian, a Lamarckian, one who refused to believe in the Matriosha construction of the atom.

What happens to the lover who gambled everything on a theory which turns out to be a lame duck? Not only its conclusions, but the observations which led to them - a mish-mash of fantasy, extrapolation and assumption. Well, of course the falsehood must be abandoned, but the lover must abandon the mindset which led to the errors in the first place, and this is the most important thing.

In the normal course of events, this means an extra dose of cynicism and impenetrability. Your author, though, would be hard-pressed to ramp these up any further, and it occurs to me anyway that the greatest cynic is the most porous, and I remember reading that certain top athletes actually perform better with a virus in their bodies.

I can now see the arrogance which powered the Theory, and I discard it as the workings of a man who was sick with love. Love itself, though, complete and in need of no revision; which slips through empiricism’s bunched fist with a shimmer; love which is not an illness but an innoculation against love as madness - this is the thing, and it will always defy being bent to the rules of the alphabet.