I am rash and impetuous. I rush in to the empty footsteps. You lead me through a miasma, my thoughts disconnected, yet constant: Everywhere I look I see you—your ghost. I see where you have just been, where you will shortly arrive. You linger like perfume on my fingertips.

When I saw you today I started shaking. Microscopic spasms inside. It was hard to breathe. I felt the blood fill my skull. I cursed the person before me in line who was using up an eternity, fumbling with her change. I needed to be with you.

I am stricken. You don’t want me, or need me, like I need you. It’s fun for you. But for me, such fun is trivial. There is something much greater and deeper that fuels me forward, towards this bottomless pit. I ache in every corner of my being. My mind is a whirlwind without an eye—I’m blind to all but you.

Your shadow intoxicates me. You flesh is contagious. I am like the man looking over the cliff. I am so close to jumping; something silent pulls me to the edge. The gravity is powerful. I jump, I know that the fall is thrilling, but that the impact is near.

How can I describe what is happening to me? You are the best thing I’ve stumbled on, and yet I fear you the most. How can such power radiate from such beauty? How can something so small contain such virulence?

Is there a cure?

The only salve is your company. And yet, like an appetite that breeds hunger with every bite, it is such pain. There is no satiety.

No wood can assuage these flames. No water can oust this fire. It must burn. And it consumes me. This isn’t love. It’s pyromania.

Every waking moment you are in the corners of my eyes. When I close my eyes I see your face. When I sleep, there you are. I cannot escape you. If I am a whirlwind, then you are a vortex. I am electric, and you my magnetism. There is no way to separate this duality—I am made from you, by you. I am, for you.

The Apple well symbolizes the four worlds. For in the seed is
contained the image of the tree. The seeds are thus surrounded by
the core, which sustains them, yet exists from them. The fleshy part
surrounds the core, and then the skin, that subtle kingdom that
divides it, in separateness, in individuality, from the rest. So the
apple comes into being, and the tree is reborn. From the light we
move to the dense, and the whole becomes a part within the whole.

"And yet the opposite is also true. For the skin is like the first
division of the realms: veritably it partitions space from space,
and from emptiness the first sphere is laid down; then the fleshy
part, which surrounds a denser core, and then the seed, the densest
part of the fruit – the kingdom, which grows, and the tree is reborn.

"So it is the light is within the densest part, and the densest
within the lightest. The two are one, and the direction is one. We
move out from Atziluth. We move in from Assiah. Baruch HaShem.