Line from the song "Bodies" which appears on the second disc of The Smashing Pumpkins album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Literally, it means that love is death, death for yourself, death at your own hands. Falling in love with someone is akin to killing yourself.

Love being suicide doesn't literally happen very much, but it can often feel like it, especially when that love ends. It can end in many different ways, but one constant is that it hurts and sometimes that hurting never stops.

Linked to this is the Hedgehog's Dilemma, if love is suicide, if it hurts so much, why do we desire it so? Why is it that the pain we feel the most is of a broken heart?

love is many things, for sure, but it is NOT suicide.

Pardon me for taking this seriously, but speaking as someone who has lost people in this manner I can tell you that is not a fair comparison, analogy or anything.

Suicide is, by definition, an act of SELF love and SELF hatred. It is all about self. Love is, by definition, all about someone, or something else.

While love is often painful, life is also often painful. Love is life at it's most extreme, the best and the worst. Love is often difficult for people who feel things strongly because it is the most intense of all of those feelings. But it is about life to the nth degree. It is not about null.

Suicide is a selfish act of self hatred and/or hatred of others turned inward. It is always harder on those left behind.

If there is an antithesis of infatuation (maybe there isn't one) it is suicide.

If you lose yourself in someone or something it may be love, it may be grace, it may just be sexual intoxication. But it is NOT suicide.

Maybe love is suicide in the same way it's suicide for a caterpillar to transform into a butterfly. When we fall in love we become something more then we were before. We gain a new perspective, the world stays the same, but we see it with new eyes. This cannot happen unless we let go of our previous selves.

It's like the stories about Zen. We cannot grow unless we empty our respective cups.

I know, I knew, I always knew that you would never run through the streets to find me, to bring me home if I ever faltered.
I never thought that you would abandon me so completely and yet pretend that you didn't.
An unexpected cruelty.
If I thought that a bike ride in the park could really fix it, don't you think I would do it?
But I know that's not the problem.
Your heart's just not in it.
I don't know if your heart's not there for me or if it's not there for anyone, but it's not there.
You could say I knew that from the beginning.
I knew. I did. You told me.

And I know that I'm not holding up my end of the bargain.
I said that I was strong enough to carry you with me and never let go.
But I faltered.
And I'm just dragging you now.
Hitting every rock on the way, unable to move anywhere but into the future, unable to stop or retreat.
Without the strength you take you up again, to lift you up.
And every time I try to find a new source of strength, you thrash and kick and when I finally get you to admit that you're thrashing, when I finally get you to say why, you say it's because I'm paying too much attention to other things, not committed enough to our together time.
Not committed enough to you.
So I abandon my solace in the outside world. I pretend that I can gather strength from you --
a thrashing corpse dangling from my fingertips.
And my remaining options are none but to hang on and drag and drag and kill us both,
or to break my promise and walk on without you.

I would rather die, I think, than leave you.
When I imagine my future, I'm in a white room, alone, and the walls are covered in blood.
But those visions would all go away, I know, if I could just let go.

Or if... .
But, no, I wouldn't encourage that either.
Because if you ever stood and walked, you would only walk away.

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