Suicide is, but what is suicide? First let me tell you. Then I will show you.

To begin to be ready for the answer, remember that love is, but what then is love? Is love this but not that and none other at all? Are all loves only these that are gradients from pale to bright and blinding to cool and comfortable with or without what is true above and beyond all else? For one kind of love to be true do all others need to be false? For this love to be deep and abiding are all others shallow and easily washed away? If love is pure, is it also corrupted, or diluted, or alloyed? Can love be both good and bad, right and wrong, deprived and nourishing, damaging and healing, liberating and enslaving? Is love a thought or a sentiment or an aim or an experience or a recollection? Are all objects of love loved in the very same way? Must the loved return love in equal measure over equal duration with equal effect?

Did the species we first became love all the same as we have loved ever since and as we love now and as we will love for all time? Does love flow strictly from constancy and command of nature or the divine, or are there governments of love that come and go, here and there and all around, that saction and forbid, incent and discourage, legitimize and outlaw, restrain and unleash love so that each love falls under a mix of authorities and jurisdictions? Do lovers sometimes bristle at regimes of love so that love becomes revolt and rebellion against what is love? Who is right and who is wrong in matters of love?

Is love ultimately a command and imperative, an array of qualities of loving, a bargain or benefit, a relation not without which, a vivid experience and memory, a building block of species and society? Can what love is change for a lover and a loved over time, and are these changes all the same for all lovers in all places and times?

Must love be consistent or can it run hot and cold? Can we know what love is by what love is not? What then is not love? Is love that also hates still love or not love? Love that is jealousy? Love that abuses? Love that covets? Love that cheats? Love that abandons? Love that kills?

Can you tell what love is without ever having loved or having been loved? Can you, by thinking about love, get to love itself? Must love simply be felt? Or felt and then thought about? Or thought about in order truly to feel? Or experienced only once and truly or many times finally to get it right or too many times to dilute and erode the power and import of love?

Is everyone who thinks they love or are loved truly in love or truly loved, and can you love or be loved without truly knowing it or only much later discovering that it was so? Is love always valuable or invaluable or does love need reevaluation in and over time properly to appraise its value appreciation or debasement?

Is love best captured in a word, a letter, a sonnet, a novel, or a movie or does love depicted always fail truly to spell out the richness and paucity of even a moment lived in love just as a moment of love cannot capture and comprehend the sheer weight or emptiness of love over time, just as the span of love forgets countless moments along the way and appraises itself now distilled or altered or imagined and retold into a word, or a poem, or a story of love? Whether or not there is true love, is what love is not often a collection or recollection of truth and fiction, honestly and lies, light and shadow?

I will not define love, declares the poet, yet it is so. I cannot define love, says the judge, except to see it. I want to know what love is, sings the song. I want you to show me.

With what love is in mind, what then is suicide?

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