It is just love. Just life. Setting the two people whose love, out of all that in my experience so far, is most exquisite, beside each other. You may guess that Ciaran is one of these. This is essentially a little aside to him, thinking about the reasons he may approve of the more recent and equally beautiful human for whom I have that same level of affection, even though it's been a few years now, and experience and cynicism has made it more difficult for me to love anyone so dearly.   An interesting note on your last sentence- I don't know how much you know about philisophy, but you reminded me of John Locke. Very simply, he claimed that humans are inherently good, and our experience on Earth makes us evil. Thomas Hobbes insisted on quite the opposite, that humans are basically machines, our thoughts and emotions governed by basic physics and chains of cause and effect rather than some sort of spiritual thing, and all our actions are motivated by keeping ourselves out of pain and pursuing our own self-interests. I very often wonder which of these schools of thought I lean more towards.    Anyway. You just reminded me. There's your little today-I-learned for the day. Haha.

I would love it if you shared some insight about this. (Heck, on of all of them. But I can't do that.) I feel like there's something in there, in the midst of these jeweled words, something deeper and bare. An emotion that some of us have felt. Your imagery stuns me—always. The innocence of childhood is pictured perfectly. Adults and society stain the ermine white inonocence of a child. Children are never born prejudiced; we make them that way, infiltrating their pure minds with our disgustting hate.