LET’S START HERE:
Let’s pretend Love and Hate are two people tied up together, not holding hands or making love so much but all of it, all pieces of them, every flake of skin and strand of hair and coil of DNA wrapped together and entwined and bound.
I imagine Love on one side of a paper-thin wall and Hate on the other. Electrical lines run through the wall—they’re the lines that power the entire house—and I think about Love and Hate laying their upright bodies along the wall, pressing their ears into the plaster, hearing the current pulsing through. It lives right in your spine, a tension like that, a kind of Love-Hate like that.
I think of fights I’ve had in the streets. Once, I loved someone so much that I raged right on O’Farrell, shattering my phone because I could not hold back. I should probably keep porcelain objects in my bag, like a delicate little dachshund or a dairy maid sitting on a stool, so that when the storm comes and the lightening cracks I can go “Here, shatter this.” Because isn’t that it? How Love|Hate makes you want to ruin fragile things? It’s like building a house that you then want to burn down.
When I round the corner and find her raging in the street, I slow my walk and watch her, just let her be. She’s so angry and hurting, this other me. After a minute, when she comes up for air, I lead her down the block to that little inlet where the water meets the shore. I take out all those things that I carry in my bag: the dachshund, the dairy maid, a little jewelry box, a whale. “Go for it, honey,” I say, placing a hammer in her hands. “Go nuts,” and I just let her rage.
As for the shards, she can do with them what she will: glue them back together or make a mosaic or throw them in the sea, or pick them up, one by one, look at and examine and admire them, and then, if she wants, just put them back down.