Show me love

“I love you to the moon and back…” — this is one of my least favorite clichés. So how do you show love through imagery? For this one, I’m going to turn to two pieces of fiction with my favorite descriptions of love.

The first one is from The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. I just started reading this book and ran into this telling of a husband’s love for his deceased wife. When the wife died (she was hit by a bus), the husband absorbed himself in his work (a lunch runner) because he felt that he had to win back her love. She had doted over their only child, a son, from the time he was born, so he felt he had lost her:

“He knew his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love.”

Wow, what a poetic image that created; you can feel everything that the husband felt; you can empathize with his life and death.

My absolute favorite description of love comes from Carlos Fuentes’ short story: Viva Mi Fama. It’s a beautiful, surreal story about a Spanish bullfighter, a model, and an aging Goya. The bullfighter, Rubén Oliva, is in the opening scene with his wife; she is yelling at him in their home and before he walks out the author gives us this:

“Rubén no longer heard her. He smelled her and felt like killing her, but how can you kill the moon, for that was what she was for him, not the sun of his life, but yes, a familiar moon that appeared every night without fail; and although its light was cool, its appearance excited him, and although its sands were sterile, they seemed fertile since its hypnotic movements moved the tides, marked the dates, governed the calendar, and drained the garbage from the world…”

Absolutely perfect. Of course, it isn’t a happy, lovey description of Rubén’s feelings for her, but the author showed you exactly what is going on in Rubén’s mind in that moment.

Both of these passages are great examples of showing something. I was lost in each description as soon as my mind fell into them. This is where you just have to let you imagination take over, avoid abstractions, and actually build the image for the reader, move them with the words into the world you are creating.

Go read, find some images relating to love and think about your own writing. And, avoid telling someone you love them to the moon and back…