It’s been a long time.

SInce I fell in love with – with her? With it?

I don’t know if it was a person — a real flesh-and-blood person, a dream person, or just someone I made up. BUt I fell in love in a way that changed my life.

Or maybe it wasn’t a person; maybe it was with a story; or with the process itself; words becoming dialog, story, people who live, die, bleed, fuck, hate, and love.

But it was love that changed me. Love for that person or thing or process; but love.

But the other thing was rage.

HAte would be the easy works to call it; as a metaphor it seems more powerful. l-o-v-e and h-a-t-e across the knuckles. We like bialy ideas, things in balance. We like good and evil because they’re at war, but they define each other (without an opposite point on a scale, we have no scale; no hot leaves no cold, no bad leaves no good. We have a constant state, not polar ends with gradients between.

But hate is a word – like love – which says to little in itself, and is invested with two many other notions. We define it as an opposite, on an invented scale. We imbue it with power, cultural and spiritual. That’s a strong word, we caution our children, when they chirp ‘you know what i really hate?’

HAte means took little and is wrapped in two much; and worse, it simply doesn’t say what I mean to say.

Rage is better. Rage isn’t hatred; rage isn’t cold, seething. Rage does not plan or simmer low; rage explodes, screaming, scratching, biting.

Rage is a mind-full of oxytocin, epinephrine, corticotropin-releasing hormones; it’s a vein-shot of things that makes the mind and body go, that ready it for action, for fight (or for flight).

Rage is powerful – and rage is profoundly stupid. Hate, in the context of novels, is the plot of a cozy set on a train leaving istanbul. Hate is in the mind; it’s a series of choices, it’s a state one holds in cooperation with the hind-brain. One feeds and treasures hate.

Rage – just is. IT’s the hard wiring, the nerves, the animal brain. IT’s an artifact of an era when we had leap from a tree with a pointed stick, psyched out of our minds on the pituitary cocktail of hormones that prepare is to fight and kill, or run and live.

Rage is a fucking high; hate is a low.

PArt of what drives me isn’t love, or the need to create. It’s some other need; control, drive, destroy, consume. Rage moves me, breaks me out of complacency and lethargy. Rage gets things done.

When I dreamed of a woman who seemed as real as anyone I’d ever kissed, touched or loved, I awake suffused not simply with lust (and yes, with lust, it was that sort of dream); I awoke suffused with something like, love, and in fact something like rage. The loss – a woman I’d met, and fucked, and loved, and needed was taken away by the simple act of waking from sleep.

She would go, and I could not let her – I had to take control of her and make her mine.

But I knew already – again, hat rage in the pack of my skull – that she was something of dream, something of ether, something impossible. She could do only two things, once brought forth into some sort of real world; she could break hearts, and she could die. And I was going to have to kill her.

Along the way, there was violence, blood, rage, hearts broken, love, carnage, and death.

Blood drips from the writer’s pen, all too often.