Flint

Dearest Ketaki,

All my life I have watched my parents, and their love for each other, and for me. And I know this now.

That there is another, more dangerous love, smoking pot and sharing dirty stories around a campfire. This love does not cherish and protect. It does not nurture. It does not dream of comfortable years ahead, in unsearing, hurtless constancy. It is here, it is now, it does not care for tomorrow.

There is another, more dangerous love, bursting into beauty in the centre of the sky. It is the coruscating brilliance of fireworks, their blazing triumph. It is the upward gaze of the children who watch the fireworks, it is the length and the breadth and the scope of their dreams. And in the incandescence that lights up their excited faces and pointing fingers, in all its flaming beauty, it self destructs.

There is another, more dangerous love, that combusts spontaneously in the collision of two bodies. It laughs as the world implodes into orgasm, impaled on a thousand shards of heart break, it appeases with smoke and assuages with drink, and all the time, it laughs on a slight note of hysteria, on the simmering edge of insanity.

There is another, more dangerous love, Ketaki. It rises slowly up my limbs and wraps its tentacles around my heart. When I hold you in my arms and feel your teeth on my skin, it spreads malignantly through my brain. It will be the death of me, Ketaki. There is another, more dangerous love. I see it in the bruises you leave on my throat. Blue and purple and dangerous.

Arnab.