I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

Lord, help us root our feet to the earthAnd our eyes to the roadAnd always remember the fallen angelsWho, attempting to soar,Were seared instead by the sun and, wings melting,Came crashing back to the sea.Lord, help root my eyes to the earthAnd stay my eyes to the roadSo I may never stumble.-Psalm 24 (From "Prayer and Study," The Book of Shhh)

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

I know that the whole point—the only point—is tofind the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse tolet them go.

You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.

And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.