The World in Love

THE WORLD IN LOVE

Idiots’Books Volume XXXVII

Idiots’Books

Idiots’Books

Idiots’Books 100 South Queen Street Chestertown, MD 21620 Copyright © 2013

Idiots’Books All rights reserved

THE WORLD IN LOVE

By Matthew Swanson Illustrated by Robbi Behr

To the moon and the tides.

Z 1

When the whole world falls in love at once, there is the sound of an avalanche followed by a stretch of perfect silence as we hunker in our burrows in the snow.

We don’t quite know which way is up and panic some, but as we thrash about, together in our rapture, we inch slowly closer to the center of the world.

There are a few minutes of actual happiness. We all get a little more beautiful.

Our knees bend better than they did. Our old cars run new.

We have never felt like this before. We consult our diaries and confirm that the words and sentences we used to describe our former bouts of so-called love are not sufficient now.

Because we don’t know the language of love, we say nothing at first. But then, as love grows, we can’t help but babble. We revel in the incoherence, forgetting what it means to make sense, and loving the forgetting, no pressure to perform, the relief of not having to comb our hair.

We laugh in a space of no consequence, no expectation. We love and do not want.

We love and do not need. We love and do not hope—because who needs hope when one has everything?

Love, love, love. We run out of greeting cards with love themes. We buy graduation cards instead. We cross out “graduation” and write “love.” We run out of roses and give dandelions.

We’re so in love that we scoff at diamonds. We need no shiny proof. We feel this love in our thighbones. In our eyelashes. In the meat of our teeth.

We forget to eat. The restaurants languish. The hotels thrive. The world runs out of latex, but no one cares. Babies born in a sea of love will surely know how to swim in it.

All commerce stops. All public services.

We’re all so happy that we do not see the trash pile up. We’re all too busy in our bliss to notice the rising rates, the crumbling highways, the price of tea in China.

In China, tea is free, because the Chinese are so in love that they will not charge a single yuan. Take it, they say. Take it in the name of love. They say it in Chinese, but still we know exactly what they mean.

The tides are in love, in love with the moon. Longing and restless, they rise and fall against the sand. They reach across the empty miles, endlessly faithful, keeping our clocks running true.

We’d thank them if only we cared about getting there on time, if only we weren’t so in love.

And what is love? And what does it mean?

Is it ardor? Yes. Is it admiration? Yes. Is it the utter lack of consciousness of shortcoming and flaw? Yes. Yes. Yes.

The various lobbyists who count on strife lose all their leverage. The election goes to a nice man named Dan who is in love.

The first baby of the year. We name her Love.

Who else suffers from this love? The judges, the psychiatrists, the wardens, the television writers. But since they are in love, they suffer less. And then not at all.

They give in to love and become massage therapists and preschool teachers and game show hosts.

When love is at its peak, there are no shadows. The only parts of our tongues that work are the parts that taste the sweet. The only memories we have are memories of love. We do not recall the deaths of dogs, the loss of funds, the mangling of fenders. We live in a fog of love and see only inches in front of our faces.

But why are we in love? What is it we have found? And how can we endure the thought of losing it? We blind ourselves to the notion of love’s passing. We blind ourselves with love. Soon, loss of love is impossible, like unicorns or food that tastes good and is also good for you.

We print banners, make needlepoint samplers, buy radio time in the seventh inning of the ballgame. The message, resounding and uncomplicated: we are in love. Forever and ever in love.

Z 2

Love has a curve. It can be graphed. We are past the highest point of love but don’t yet know it. The end of love is inevitable, if undetermined. When, not if.

Sooner, not later.

When love begins to end, we don’t notice at first. We have an inkling of another thing we’d like to do this afternoon. Is it golf? It might be golf. It might be taxes or a crossword. Or maybe just a nap.

Eventually, we get into our cars again. We have to get our oysters and our incense, after all. Now there is congestion on the highways, but still not so much honking.

There is a shortage of favorite toys at Christmastime, but no one’s grandma gets punched in the face. Not yet.

The end of love spreads. It’s sudden, surprising. The lights come back on. We sweep up the streets. We organize our closets. We restock our cupboards and buy milk.

We know that love is ending because we stub our toes and notice. We haven’t felt pain in so long. The sensation is refreshing.

We look in the mirror and see that we are soft. Suddenly, we care how we look. We turn our focus to the state of our lawns, to the fact that we are stuck in middle management, to Nancy at reception.

The end of love is a sudden fire that clears out the tangled and the brittle and the dry. The rich dead ash revives the soil.

The rain makes a muddy bed for something else to sprout in.

The route we took as we moved toward love was just as short as the one that brought us back again. But on the way we sprinted, and now we drag our feet, reluctant to leave that place that used to be so warm and nicely painted, noticing how cold it is out there.

But we are tired of love. Tired in love.

We are sluggish and irritated. We knock back whiskey sours, hoping it will dull the edge of this strange emerging ache—that it can make new again this love we can’t hold on to.

Evidence everywhere of love’s end. The engines cycling back to life. Ambition in the atmosphere. Good, productive acrimony on the AP wire. Now that love is done, we can get back to work. Back to the striving.

Z 3

We look back on love as a time of aberration. We lost ourselves in a momentary daze—an adolescent accident for which we can forgive ourselves. It can happen to anyone. It happened to everyone, in fact.

In Plano, there are a few who won’t abandon love. We devise an excuse to bulldoze their home. But they just move to another home and keep on loving. They are an anomaly, and we send scientists to take samples of their blood.

We are trembling on the edge of the canyon of love from which we somehow crawled—damaged but resolute, fragile but recovering, all of us survivors.

Free of love, we are safe again, guided by a simple plan for living. We wake and wash and eat and work and eat and work and eat and watch TV and sleep and dream a while and wake again too soon.

We go on like this. And on and on.

We call it life. Waiting for things to happen. Some things don’t happen and others do, and when they do, we wait for other things.

We mind our business and the business of others. We get older. We eat and sweat and buy. We are not in love. Not at all in love. And this is how we like it.

And then, one day, a simple glance from Nancy as she stands there at the copier.

Unexpected but welcome. The office air the honey hue of low-angle afternoon light. A reciprocal smile. A conversation in the break room. A dinner at that little place beyond the boardwalk.

And suddenly, a bomb goes off and everyone’s in love again. Garters fly as shades are drawn and poems are scrawled and fears are abandoned once more.

The tides are in love, indifferent to the noise we make. They have always been in love. While we were on hiatus, they stayed here at the shore, in endless conversation with the moon.

We walk along the water’s edge, too giddy in our latest love to understand what love could be—the moon reflected on the sea, as it was before we came, as it will be when we all wake up again.

Idiots’Books

Idiots’Books

This book is the product of collaboration between Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr of Idiots’Books. Technically speaking, they are “in love,” but the truth is, they just really like spending time with one another.

Matthew Swanson is a writer/harmonica player/late bloomer whose Idiots’Books lack of qualifications in matters of love could fill countless fat volumes.

The low point of his romantic career was cancelling on a girl who had invited him to the Sadie Hawkins dance when he received an invitation from another girl with slightly bigger boobs.

Robbi Behr is an illustrator/commercial salmon fisherwoman/hopeful unromantic whose idea of a hot date is stone silence, a perfectly cooked pork chop, and a side of butter. She once burst out laughing when an earnest boy asked her to “go out” in eighth grade. Later, she felt bad about it.

They live together in the hayloft of a barn in Chestertown, Maryland.

Also by Idiots’Books Facial Features of French Explorers (Vol. 1) Death of Henry (Vol. 2) Ten Thousand Stories (Vol. 3) Man Joe Rises (Vol. 4) Unattractive and Inadequate (Vol. 5) Richard Nixon (Vol. 6) Understanding Traffic (Vol. 7) Dawn of the Fats (Vol. 8) The Contented (Vol. 9) The Clearing (Vol. 10) George Washington Slept Here (Vol. 11) Last Day (Vol. 12) The Nearly Perfect Sisters of the Holy Bliss (Vol. 13) The Vast Sahara (Vol. 14) The Baby is Disappointing (Vol. 15) Let Me Count the Ways (Vol. 16) Animal House (Vol. 17) After Everafter (Vol. 18) Floating on the Ocean (Vol. 19) Jericho (Vol. 20) The Last of the Real Small Farmers (Vol. 21) Tarpits and Canyonlands (Vol. 22)

Nasty Chipmunk (Vol. 23) The New South (Vol. 24) From the Inside Out (Vol. 25) The Makers Tile Game (Vol. 26) Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (Vol. 27) Babies Ruin Everything (Vol. 28) Homer Was an Epic Poet (Vol. 29) An Inconclusive Passage in the Life of Bushy Washington (Vol. 30) Stranded in Strange Waters (Vol. 31) Avoid Disappointment and Future Regret (Vol. 32) Build Your Own President: 2012 (Vol. 33) Baby Apocalypse (Vol. 34) Hey, Baby! Here’s What to Expect (Vol. 35) Sisyphus Rex (Vol. 36) For the Love of God A Bully Named Chuck My Henderson Robot St. Michaels: The Town That Somehow Fooled the British

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The World in Love Copyright © February 2013 Idiots’Books Vol. 37 www.idiotsbooks.com