Rebecca Fisseha, Writer.

Love is like someone knocking at the door to the most private part of you and you’re inside running around frantically straightening up the room while calling out “Just a minute!”. And that knocking keeps coming, consistent and insistent. And the more you straighten up the more you feel you’ve messed it up instead. Sooner or later, you must open the door. It would be rude not to. Hopefully, you’ll remember to take a moment and a breath before you do. No matter how good of a cleanup job you did, you’ll instantly apologize for the mess, and the whole time you’re entertaining your lover in the room for the first time you’ll be half wondering if your lover saw that unsightly whatever peeking out from under the broken down wherever. For later visits, you become better at straightening up before the fact, but eventually you’ll start to leave things as they are  (most likely after a visit to your lover’s own room) and even point out areas you missed or just plain can’t be bothered with. Then one day you hand over the spare key and all bets are off. You can no longer tell whose mess is which and the only sensible thing to do now looks like to just move in together.

Unless it was just the water-meter man at the door.

And Hate? Well, hate is like a part of town that you know is no good for you but you keep finding yourself out there anyway. They’ve got the good stuff, that’s why. The first hit goes down like a shot of whisky on a dry throat and an empty stomach. It’s a heat wave that leaves you flaming from the inside out and makes everything around you assume the wavy uncertainty of a mirage. It dies down, as it must, or you would become immolated in your own flame like the protesting monks of Tibet who feel not much of anything, what with being on the seventh level of heaven and all. The pulsating warmth left behind after this initial shock is what makes you go out for a second hit. Surprisingly, it burns worse than the first. This can’t be right, you say, and test again. Third contact actually starts you flirting with nausea. To offset that, you go for a fourth, and that’s when you get the feeling of a thick blanket growing into form inside you.

This drivel makes no sense. Sort of like hate. So, good people, hate may be kind of hot but love is better. As the Buddhists say, hate is like a hot coal that you hold in  your hand, intending to throw it at the offender. Only you never do end up throwing it, and it burns you way more than anybody else.

So, walking on hot coals = pretty cool, will draw a crowd.

Holding a hot coal = stupid, better to hold a hot body instead.

(Apologies)