Chapter 1020: Chapter 1020 - Taming Impossible Puzzles - 4

The three of them sat in the center of the large room near the bed.

"Where are you in the discussion?"

Larissa spoke first.

She did it with the efficiency of someone who had summarized difficult conversations enough times to know what to include and what to leave out without the summary losing the relevant information. The proposal to divide their time. The political argument for why an alliance between the three of them and Ren made structural sense. What Luna had said, relayed almost without alteration, because what Luna had said didn’t need editing.

Selphira listened without interrupting.

But when Larissa was about to speak about Liora, Selphira stopped her and looked at Liora directly.

Liora didn’t need to be asked.

"Luna wants to be a martyr for all three of us," she said, with the direct voice she had when she had stopped calculating how what she was about to say would sound. "She thinks she’s paying back an enormous debt and she’s calling it a decision and love. And Larissa is being political instead of thinking about what she actually feels and wants."

Her eyes moved between the two of them.

"And dividing things up like this, splitting the time, making it organized like a calendar while we pretend nothing is happening..." she shook her head. "I’m not convinced."

Silence.

Selphira looked at all three of them for a moment with the attention of someone who had seen enough variations of this particular moment to recognize most of the problem in this one. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Then she looked at Liora with something that wasn’t exactly tenderness but that resembled it from a certain distance.

"I taught you to be assertive," she said. "Not to apologize for what you really wanted and to defend it..."

"But I haven’t yet taught you the more complicated part."

Liora frowned.

"We’ll get to that later." Selphira adjusted herself against the stacked pillows with the care of someone still learning which positions were comfortable in a body that was still adapting to being itself again. "First we’re going to talk about that big problem called love."

Mayo opened her mouth.

"You don’t know how to explain it funny when you don’t fully understand it even though you think you do," said Selphira without looking at her. "So close it."

Mayo closed it.

♢♢♢♢

"Love," Selphira began, in the tone of someone about to say something they know from personal experience isn’t pleasant to hear, "is one of the worst things that exists."

The three of them looked at her worried.

"Relax... I don’t mean it like that. Not as an insult or with hatred. I’m saying it as a technical description." She looked at the space between them for a moment. "I am four hundred years old. I have seen enough couples and families form and come apart over ’love’ to have an informed opinion about nearly anything involving human beings and the promises they make that dissolve easily over time."

"Yes... There are a small number of exceptions. Sometimes it’s much stronger and lasts, but most of those times it transforms into something else..."

"...And that destroys lives," she continued. "The ’intense love,’ the kind that lasts long enough, creates the worst conflicts that exist. Since without love there is no real hatred. The longest wars I have witnessed in four centuries began because someone ’loved’ something or someone and someone else threatened it."

She looked at all three of them.

"But I call that ’obsession’, not love. The idealized love they sell you in stories is safe precisely because it doesn’t exist..."

A pause.

"The idealized love that my granddaughter Liora is talking about, the one you have in your heads right now as adolescents, the one that keeps you awake, the one that makes a conversation about a boy feel like the world depends on it... that love doesn’t exist."

Luna’s expression didn’t change.

Larissa’s didn’t either.

Liora opened her mouth.

"Listen to me until the end," said Selphira.

Liora closed it.

"It doesn’t exist and it does exist at the same time, but it’s complicated. As you told them yourself, passion exists, but passion is passion, admiration is admiration, and so on. None of those things are the love you’re looking for."

She let that sit for a moment before continuing, especially for Liora.

"The feeling you’re living right now is real, it’s intense. It’s one of the most complete experiences a human body can have. And unfortunately it disappears quickly, not because something goes wrong, but because that is exactly what passion or "infatuation" does after you grow... It arrives intensely and then transforms into something more stable, plain and controllable. That’s not love; that has its own names in bodily processes of growth and instinct."

Another pause.

"So what do we have left? Affection exists. It’s real, it’s sustainable if you tend to it correctly, it’s what remains when passion gets old. But that’s not love either, that’s affection, and it has its own name."

She looked at the recovered arm for a moment, something in the gesture that wasn’t deliberate commentary but was present anyway.

"Admiration exists. I’ve felt it for very few people in four hundred years, but I’ve felt it, and it’s one of the purest things you can feel for another person, as long as it doesn’t become envy. And yet, that isn’t love either."

"Then what is love," said Larissa. Not quite a question, more like the space she was making for the answer she felt was soon to arrive.

"I’ve been thinking about it since I was approximately your age," said Selphira. "Which is so long ago that the house where I was born no longer exists even as ruins." A very brief pause. "The closest I’ve come to defining idealized love without it collapsing under scrutiny is this: to love is simply to realize or want that something becomes part of you."

All three of them were quiet.

"A mother understands this instinctively because she carried another person inside her body, the bond is physical before it becomes emotional. But it functions in any direction, with any person, in any kind of relationship. When you want to live your life with someone and make them your partner, you’re trying to integrate them into that same concept. When something becomes part of you, when their horizon matters the same way yours does, when their absence makes you feel like something that was yours is missing, that is the closest thing to the ideal non dangerous love."