Our first experiences as a person are unhinged and free from words and desires. Words create desires, linked to the nexus of fusing sentences that start out as thoughts. Experiences are monastic and solitary; no two people have the same experience despite living in the exact same moment. Example: pain. The first experience of pain is ‘owwwwww.’ That is pain. When does the word translate into and from raw experience? … Our parents take us to the doctor and say, this new word, “She is in pain,” or “He is experiencing discomfort.” We are prescribed a painkiller, sometimes even in the form of a placebo: a lollipop or a chocolate bar, and are sent back into the pool of experience. However, now we are armed with a word that expresses and balances one particular experience: owwwwww.

But what describes the unhinged, onomatopoeic experience of love, and who is the doctor of existence we must see? What would he or she prescribe counter-act it and kill it? If only there were some pill to take to balance the deafening silence of love’s onomatopoeic sermons; I would swallow that tablet in a heartbeat. Question: Is it for the same reason that adults do not explain romantic love to children? To safeguard themselves from these enigmatic and undefinable experiences? Answer unknown.

[…]

How absurd would it be to appear at the doctor’s office and say, “I'm in love.” Why you would be laughed at! But would it really be that absurd to consider such a trip? That absurdity, of showing up at the doctor’s office, would only coax truth. Truth that had obnubilated itself until the moment of that very absurdity. Love must be like suffering then, with only the one way to overcome and balance it.

— Unused excerpt from the forthcoming "The Romantic and The Vile"