By all means, spend your one brief moment above the dirt toiling for the satisfaction of your imaginary biological teleology, as an earlier generation toiled for its imaginary god.

By all means, cradle your woman in bed, and do not think about the treachery that beats in her heart, so close to your own.

Do not think about the way she will forsake you, after the many years you spend drying her tears, for a perfect stranger whose smell she finds more enticing, or whose clothing piques her curiosity, or who has nothing whatsoever to offer her other than the simple fact that he is not you.

Do not think about the truth that the mother of your children, the woman who pledged before her god to die with you, will find reasons to blame you for her unhappiness the moment she has her chance to make a life with a man of greater material means. Do not think about the fact that she will be happier in her new and larger home, and that she will not think of you alone, nor will she feel remorse.

Do not think about the way your children, to whom you gave the gift of life, for whose education you expended the best years of your only life in soul-killing drudgery, will institutionalise you without regret the moment you become any sort of emotional or financial burden, just as you did to your own.

You spend the balance of your life tending to the pain of a stranger, to whom you are a stranger.

You believe that this will make your pain bearable, that your acts of mercy towards another will be returned in kind.

They will not.

You rebel against this truth, because you are too young, and too naive, and too untested by life to understand it.

Say whatever you wish about those of us who see the folly of this agony, for we are not concerned by your fear of us, and understand your need to pretend that it is you who have found that better end of this bargain.

Resist the fact that you are not loved, as an earlier generation resisted the fact that it must die.

Eventually, the considerable time you spend alone in miserable solitude will grant you opportunity for detached observation of humanity, something people who run around giggling with their lovers never get. You will find it depraved and bestial. You will turn your hatred outwards to all of humankind and loath both women and men; you will become purified by your hatred, morally invincible and free from the bonds imposed by human companionship, free to wage the unwinnable, glorious war of reprisal on an intrinsically twisted and brutile ethos ever sodomised by the universal order of eternal injustice.

There is a reason that all the world’s religions have insisted on dragging down the possibility of love between humans and made it subordinate to the love of an Other that is perfect, precisely because that Other is beyond our reach. The best of lovers is the one that is far, far away, to whom you write love letters in fervent anticipation, and who is not besmirched by the endless disappointing humiliation of contact. And that is why it is those who truly love best, the forsaken soldiers dying in distant lands, suffer the most, for they love the most, and the most sincerely.

That perfect lover, the one that patiently dries all of your tears, that knows all of your fears without thinking less of you, that comforts you in the long nights that precede those most desperate of trials, cannot, and does not survive contact. That is precisely why the greatest lover cannot, must not, be met. And that is why the most desperate of lovers call their beloved God and say to themselves that were He to be seen, were merely His name to be spoken, it should mean certain death.

And that is why for the lovers of God heartbreak is always merely a prelude to an even more passionate reconciliation, because their beloved always takes them back, always accepts them back into its bosom, for that beloved which those penitent lovers seek to draw near is permitted one ultimate, unconquerable strength denied to all other things of which we can have thoughts. It does not exist.

And that is why, unlike the soldiers abandoned by those that sealed their treachery with solemn kisses, the priests suffer not at all, for they love nothing at all, and are not kissed, not by any, forever, for all time.

Some of us are destined to never find companionship, never find lasting solace in the arms of another, and the sooner we accept this, the sooner a new world of previously unimagined dangers opens up to us.

In the exploration of these dangers, we become living testaments to the virtues of struggle, and gain a stamina that others shall never have the privilege to know.

Rather than drift into slumber in the bed of an eternal stranger, we seek a bed of flames, and with no partner, no pair, no twin, we attain a singular uniqueness and inflict upon ourselves a solitude that is the unhealing wound from which all our strength flows.

We alone know that all flesh is grass, that all promises are fantasies, that all dreams are narcotics.

We alone live without lies, without the need to enslave or to be enslaved.

We write the stories of our lives patiently, and from the other side of death. The realm of eternity is ours alone.