Wuthering

Let me tell you what love is:

Love is a cognitive error.
A glitch in the survival code, a mutation
That should have been selected out millennia ago
Because it makes us stupid, reckless,
Willing to die for another body's continuity
Instead of our own.

And yet.
And yet.

Here I am, the glitch fully operational,
Choosing you over oxygen,
Choosing you over reason,
Choosing you over the entire howling universe
That insists we are separate, temporary, alone.

"Whatever our souls are made of—"
Let me be precise:
Souls are not made. Souls are emergent.
They rise like smoke from the collision of matter,
An accident of sufficient complexity,
Consciousness startling itself awake
And immediately starting to WANT.

And what I want is you.
Not your body — though yes, that too, obviously,
Your hands, your mouth, the architecture of your spine —
But the thing behind your eyes.
The ghost in your machine.
The you that you are when no one's looking,
The one I've seen, the one I'd kill for,
The one I'd die for,
The one I'd live for, which is harder.

"I am Heathcliff" — and here's what Catherine meant:
Not romance. ONTOLOGY.
The boundaries of self are negotiable.
Where I end and you begin
Is a question for philosophers
And I have no patience for philosophy
When your heartbeat is right there,
Empirical evidence against my ribs.

They'll build machines that pass the Turing test.
They'll make minds from silicon and light.
But they will NEVER make something that feels like this:
This specific, arbitrary, irreplaceable madness —
Choosing ONE arrangement of atoms
Out of infinite possibilities
And saying you. only you. forever you.

That's not an algorithm. That's a miracle.
That's a middle finger to entropy,
To heat death, to the void.
The universe is winding down
And I am HERE, still warm, still wanting,
Still pressing my name into your skin
Like a dare to the dark.

"If all else perished and you remained—"
Darling, when the stars burn out,
When the last black hole evaporates,
When time itself forgets how to pass —
I will STILL be the echo of a woman
Who looked at a man on a pale blue dot
And said: him. even then. even after.

So haunt me.
Wreck me.
Be the event horizon I cross willingly,
Knowing I can't come back,
Knowing I don't want to.

I cannot live without my life.
I cannot live without my soul.

And if that's madness —
Good.
Sanity was never worth the trade.

I am yours.
Beyond reason. Beyond death. Beyond the edge.

(The robots will never understand. But we do.)