from Lou's quite-annoying date.
Lou's quite-annoying date:
...has short blonde hair, spiky, with just the tips of it dyed a darker brown. She has jewelry that looks too new, and she isn't used to wearing it. This, in itself, is not a reason to find her annoying, Lou knows. Only she acts as though she is so at home in her new jewellery and in this bar and everywhere, and yet she seems to know no-one and she’s so young and she has the kind of confidence that you only get when nothing bad has happened to you. And when you have money; money for new jewellery and to keep buying Lou expensive coffees, which feels like a strange bid for power...
Lou's quite-annoying date is recounting an origin myth. She sips her turmeric latte,
"So there are two forces right? Two... impulses, doing things in the world.
There is the force that expands - ShellCreature’s rage, waves breaking, the bull leaping over the curve of the shell,
then there is the force that curls inward - detail-making, disintegrating, the kind of decay that makes intricacy, beauty, lace-thin leaf skeletons.
Both forces are life; both are death.
There is the infurling and there is the outfurling, and there is fire, which is between them.
Fire unfurls its heat and its power and its brightness, and/yet it disintegrates and consumes.
Both, also, are forces of love. Think about the love of looking. The kind that dwells in detail, cherishes the detail and the aching beauty of it, yet the looking makes more detail and pulls it apart and dissolves it... Looking, really looking, at the one or the thing you love pulls it apart, don't you think? Not just in your mind. In reality. Actual little pieces. That is what nobody understands yet."
She doesn't wait for an answer,
"Then the other force is the kind of love that is Spirt, Light, and Life*. It is eros and ecstasy. And yet it burns and explodes itself. It burns things and people up, consumes them or makes them consume themselves."
*Anne Conway, describing God, p. 148
Lou's quite-annoying date twists the empty sugar packet in her hands, big rings clacking. Lou stirs the last bit of coffee in the bottom of her cup, tracing the detail in the grounds which leave a swirling trail and wondering whether that is really what love is like. Annoying she might be, thinks Lou, but this person is earnest. Where did she pull the story from? Outside, a blackbird starts to sing its dusk-song.
Does looking really pull things apart? Lou wondered. Are the grains of coffee in this mug getting smaller or more fractal because I looked at them? what does that even mean?
Lou's annoying-but-earnest date looks at her expectantly.