The Only Way

Things are tough these days up at the Ministry. Talk of curve balls. Never saw this one coming – Love in the Times of COVID.

They think everything can happen online, the pulse of the world, its great, booming heart injected into broadband, and diffused. Hah! Mockery, I say. Sheer witchery, from what I’ve seen of those travesties of lessons on Zoom.

But love? What about love?

How can our work be condensed into a capsule, and made to flow through the sorcery of circuits, pixelated, zipped, compressed, transmuted, formatted into binary code, (code-switch yourself into it, code-switch yourself out)? (These lazy buggers down there haven’t even taken the trouble to upgrade my avatar from chubby-cheeked cherubim with bow and arrow, such is their bureaucracy…)

My work will never be aided, accelerated or taken over by AI or any of these villainous, newfangled concoctions. It will always require the beat of a real heart, the heat of skin, the pulse of the moment that races in its grip, the welding of a dimension into another, a dent in the axis of time itself. You can’t smart-ass or zoom your way around this one.

No.

My formula is simple but sure. Unfailing. It won’t flex to meet your targets, to satisfy the numbers of your pre-ordained projections.

If there’s got to be love in these times, it’s got to be old school, face-to-face.

A boy.

A girl.

Two hearts that skip a beat.