love is a Virus that

by Jacques Fiennes the Cynic

Love is a virus that you spread by breaking up with people. There is no first cause, but you think you are in love. You get wrapped up and go down deep until you find out it wasn’t the same on the other side. Shell-shocked and stumbly you head for the door, looking for someone to make the pain go away. Looking for Mr. or Miss Methadone. When you find her you latch on for dear life because the shakes are uncontrollable. It doesn’t matter how strong a person you are, how independent, those first few days are hell even for the ruggedest individual.

But while you strap in for the treatment, he or she is so enticed by the combination of passion and pain and detachment that they feel free to fall for you. In turn. The shoe has changed foots.

Love is a virus that you spread by breaking up with people. The broken-up-with becomes a wild crawling thing, an addict. The dumpee is dumpsterdiving for hope, and once they’re on their own two feet again, once they can stand and see things clearly, they no longer need Mr. or Miss Methadone, now do they? In harsh or gentle fashion they turn and walk away leaving the former injection of affection to be the new addict in the sequence.

And on and on it goes.

Like any clever virus, this one latches on symbiotically, leaving traces of itself to flare up again. Once the drained is refueled, he or she is ready again to take the strain from the next dazed and stumbling charmer.

It’s in the eyes, the shiny diamond glow of the sickly betrayed. Seductive, sensual, brimming with new loss. Fresh magnets, newly dissected with plenty of free floating electrons screaming out in radiant photon desire. These are the symptoms of the fresh addict, the ready-to-infect, and having tasted it once, our skin crawls like a bungling blindman until we can get it again.

Love is a virus, but it also has a built-in backup plan. At some point, a baby or two might emerge from all of this back and forth. Because love realizes that people grow old and dry up and stop caring so much—that they become, in a way, immune—babies are plan B to replenish Love’s stock of hosts.

How many babies are we responsible for? Think nine layers down the tree, from breaker-uper to ninth-generation break-up-ee. How many apples do you reckon bloomed along the way? How many offspring of exes and exes-of-exes (and so on) could trace a thread back to your latest bounce-back wind-em-up propagation of this love, this virus, that you spread by breaking up with people?

Maybe this is the key to a just economy. A computer traces all affairs of the heart, assigns values to connecting lines and layers of separation, weighs the fallout and the fact that some poor sods might need five or six Mr. or Miss Methadones to get by, and redistributes a fractional monthly fee for each fractional infant that everyone is fractionally responsible for. They say it takes a village to raise a child; I say it takes a village to make one. That the uberfertile, the unlucky and the stupid should shoulder all the blame seems unfair.

How many slices of baby do I have floating around out there? At least one that I can think of, but the line goes deep and the chain links long. Could be dozens. Hundreds.