What is love? Imagine a helium balloon tied down and then you cut the ropes on a windy day. That is love.

I understood how strangers met and fell into bed, not how they met and fell in love. I wasn't sure what falling in love meant. The very notion seemed so corny, so arbitrary, so fragile.

Is this love? The light looks different. Actually the shade looks different. I feel different. Everything is just so different I don't know where to begin...

I had avoided writing about love. I had never sensed that rush and buzz that comes with love, the release into the brain of body chemicals, pheromones and dopamine - the taste of love to which I was becoming addicted, his spearminty tongue when we kissed, his male sweat, the outdoor vanilla tang of his semen.

Love is a noun as well as a verb, a treacherous construct.

I was besieged by a yearning, a craving, a burning desire. My heart had opened like one of those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night.

The way the leaves on the trees tremble in the passing air is the way love reaches you, from all directions at once, mysterious, overwhelming, indescribable. To be in love is to find something you didn't know was missing.

When it happens it happens instantly. It's like diving into a pool of warm silky water, like flying through the air on invisible wings, like shedding an old skin and growing a new one. When you fall in love the spirals of your DNA unwind and rewind in the opposite direction. What was black becomes white.

I was always in love with love and now I am in love. In love, everything looks different. Everything tastes different. It is as if you have been reborn, transformed, become another person whom you don't completely recognise.