I think our problem is that we love too much and too often.

And that is very bad.

Once, I saw a little girl who dreamed of a love like ours. She had rusty hair all in curls, and wide, brown eyes all in brightness. There was a way about her that made her taste like candy to the eyes and crystal giggles to the fingers. Maybe it was that habit she had, of forgetting to coyly bite her lip whenever she smiled.

I never met her, of course. What, I, leave these four walls? My father would slit my throat.

I saw her without meaning to. When I looked into my magic handglass one day, there she was: doll-like and inexplicable. White ruffles, laces, and silken ribbons were waterfalling around her shoulders and spilling onto her pink dress, onto her stained hands -- hands made gold and purple and glittery with face-paint. Her lips were as red as sex.

I knew at once that she was trying to make herself beautiful for a boy, as all the pretty girls in my storybooks were forever doing. She was peering into a mirror of her own (I knew this, because she was practicing how to smile, and forgetting, always forgetting, to lower her sweet, pearly teeth onto her sweet bottom lip). And she was whispering, whispersinging as she tried to slather glitter onto her eyelids, "Love forever, love forever, love forever."

It was an education, watching those delicious, little-girl lips stick together before moving apart to show square, white teeth. To watch the wet, pink, cat-like tongue caress the lip whenever she rolled out the word "love" from her mouth. Such a charming child.

And then my father slicked himself out of the shadows he'd been hidingwatching in, snatched the mirror from my hand, and smashed it against my bedpost. Bright slivers of stars sprinkled all over my arms, lighting little bonfires of blood, but I didn't speak. The magic mirror had been his gift to me, so I hardly had any room to complain. And I was ashamed of myself too. But he, he was so angry, we didn't make love for many nights after that.

He doesn't like me looking at other people. It's because he loves me, you see. Like limestone loves the fossilized limpet. Love forever.

No one knows forever better than he does. He says he's three billion years old, my father, and I try to look as if I don't believe him. But I do, of course. He smells like it. Not of age, no, and neither does he stink of rank, old things. (He smells sex-sweet, always.) But to take him in with your breath is to swallow the stars hotandmuskyandeternallyhopelesslyliquidtartbrightinaseaofuninhalabledark and only stars grow into their billions.

He shines too. Tonight, I am peering outside my little, round window, and there he is, drifting about in the darkness like a hairy moth made of linen. Even though he wears his customary black, he is as white as the sun. Underneath his feet, the ground marbles, becoming smooth and slick and translucent. For minutes afterward, the soil holds that soft glow, and I have only to follow the arrow of that brilliance -- footprints growing brighter and brighter the more recent they are -- to find him in the garden.

For a moment I watch him undetected, as he bends to cup the chin of a hiccoughing boy-child in his rough, veiny hand. He does it so delicately, so shyly, one would never know that that single hand could break the neck of a bull. With his other hand, he strokes the tender stem that links the boy's head to the body of its mother plant.

Then a breeze lifts his hair and he looks up. He sees me watching him. And he turns away, pulling the boy off of its stalk in an abrupt motion. The flower-head hiccoughs out a shriek, more in surprise than horror at first; very soon, however, it realizes its fate. It squeals madly for a while, then it stops and lies limp, its tongue lolling out of a jaw forever gaped in mute screaming.

As I watch, he lets the tiny head roll from his fingers to the ground. It bounces once, rolls, bumps against his bare foot and makes it sticky with sap. Then he looks up again and makes love to my gaze with his. He smiles a spiteful, secret, crying smile. Because the boy bears my face -- as all the flowers in the garden bear only my face (because he doesn't like me looking at other people) -- and my face lies at his feet, licking his toes with its dead, graying tongue. I smile back, hopelessly, knowingly, forgivingly, because I am sick with love for him.

Love forever. And nothing else matters.

Suddenly, with a sickening twist of the walls of space, he is in my room, like a giant moth all in black and glowing. He covers me like the billowing of dark light away from a star and I pull him down, over me, around me, into me. I hunger for him and it is he who is afraid. I lick at his mouth until it opens. Then I drink from his throat, tremble underneath those hands that could crush the braincases of grown men. When he tries to get away, to gasp wetly for breath, I grab handfuls of his hair and yank him back down in a fury.

Then we fuck violently, and fall asleep in each other's arms.

In predawn gray, I wake before he does, and I hold him for a while, as if he were my child, instead of I, his. I bask in the stickiness of sweat and sperm that holds our bodies together. And then I close my eyes and wait for it, the wave of aversion towards what we had done, at what we should not have done. It comes quickly, like a sudden storm. I double over in pain. I am suddenly repulsed by him, sickened by this powerful, heavy body lying across mine, nauseated by the copious drool of our shared slime between my thighs. I am disgusted with myself, mostly. I want to wriggle out from underneath him, but I am trapped. My throat is dry.

He wakes at that moment, and seeing my heart in my eyes, he draws away. Freed, I move backward, onto the pillows, farther from him. Moisture sticks to my buttocks as I try to sit upright and form condemning words in my mouth. But my mind is dazed by my body's memories. What could I say to this man, my father? My sweet father, who'd made so much seed in me last night, so much, all so wet and warm. So much terrible love. My thoughts wind all about each other until I completely forget everything I wish to say.

All the while, he is gazing at me, with the open, vulnerable look of a child three billion years old. He doesn't seem to understand why my eyes speak so cruelly. His mouth works but no words come. He licks his lips, tongue darting out. "Are you angry?" he asks finally. "Are you angry?"

I consider, my thoughts a tumbling, roaring heat in my forehead. Yes, I would like to say. Yes! I am angry. I am defiled. I am stinking of this, the stench of my desire for you. But...

If only he would get to his feet and strike me! If only he would roar and rave and try to cow me into submission as he is wont to do in all other things! Then I could stand to oppose him, to hate him and be angry with him for making me love him so wretchedly. But there he is, half-falling from the foot of my little bed, incongruously large, and hurt and confused.

I say nothing.

Instead, I crawl to him on my hands and knees and mold myself against his body. His arms come around me like gigantic wings. With my hand tracing circles on his chest, I ask him wordlessly to take me again. And he does.

And we play like this every day, every single day for a hundred years, and we never grow any older or wiser, because our love makes us immortal, immortally foolish, foolishly content, contently immortal. It is our power, this ridiculous abomination of love. It is our godhood.

But it is precisely our problem. We love too much. We love too often.

We cling to each other, like children in the cold, because we both know this. And we cling, because we both know that one day, our immortal romance would have to

die.