Chloe Thurlow

I was always in love with love and now I am in love. In love, everything looks different. Everything tastes different. It is as if you have been reborn, transformed, become another person whom you don't completely recognise.

I was besieged by a yearning, a craving, a burning desire. My heart had opened like one of those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night.

The moment he left the warm sheets and the door clicked shut, I had that feeling you get when you are lost in a strange town at night. I curled into the chair where he had watched me undress and tears wet my cheeks. Then I dried my eyes, I looked in the mirror, and I said these two words. Never again.

Man was not born to be monogamous. What has changed in the 21st century _ at 21 the world surely has come of age _ is the understanding that woman is not meant to be monogamous either. Just as love hurts, new love heals.

Love hurts. Love is fragile. Love comes like a breath of magic, then departs leaving us feeling empty, alone, a paper cup blowing on the wind.

Sometimes love is pastel. Sometimes love is black. And sometimes love is fiery red and you feel as if you are going to burn in the flames.

When it happens it happens instantly. It's like diving into a pool of warm silky water, like flying through the air on invisible wings, like shedding an old skin and growing a new one. When you fall in love the spirals of your DNA unwind and rewind in the opposite direction. What was black becomes white.

The way the leaves on the trees tremble in the passing air is the way love reaches you, from all directions at once, mysterious, overwhelming, indescribable. To be in love is to find something you didn't know was missing.

Love and being in love are not the same thing. The woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.

Love enters us like a vague ailment. Your head spins. Your underarms tingle. Love hurts and love has consequences: marriage, babies, separation, longing, human complications.

I thought that love would last forever. But nothing is forever. Life is not forever. The only reliable permanence is change. Love hurts because change is painful. Love hurts because love lost is an assault on our ego. We fear that we will fail again and those who live in fear of failure slowly but inevitably fail.

What is love? Imagine a helium balloon tied down and then you cut the ropes on a windy day. That is love.

Love is a noun as well as a verb, a treacherous construct.

Love and being in love are not the same. A woman takes the man she loves into her body and absorbs his oils and essence. A part of him enters her and becomes a part of her.

I had avoided writing about love. I had never sensed that rush and buzz that comes with love, the release into the brain of body chemicals, pheromones and dopamine - the taste of love to which I was becoming addicted, his spearminty tongue when we kissed, his male sweat, the outdoor vanilla tang of his semen.

While love lasts it should be relished, gobbled up like ice cream, explored as the conquistadors explored the unknown continent. But when love evaporates, when love hurts, we must learn to let go of the idea that love is forever.

Love is not a spaceship you construct and then fly off together into the stars. Love is a soap bubble that bursts in the air. Love is the first winter snowflake that falls into you palm, a mirage that glows in the sun and fades in the shadows.

I understood how strangers met and fell into bed, not how they met and fell in love. I wasn't sure what falling in love meant. The very notion seemed so corny, so arbitrary, so fragile.