"LOVE THE TIGER, THE TIGER NAMED LOVE "
by Pasha Malla
At first, the couple were new. They were fresh, nervous, still testing one another out – like amputees with an experimental set of robotic limbs, if you will.
Okay, now: listen.
For the couple when they were new, Love was a tiger napping in the middle of the room between them, something for the man and woman to tiptoe warily around. Neither would acknowledge the other’s awareness of the tiger’s existence, but they remained careful, vigilant, aware. “I am just walking in a sensible, indoor fashion,” they might have reasoned, if asked. But back then the man would never have asked, never have said to the woman, “How about that tiger?” or “Sure suck s having a tiger in the room.” And the woman would certainly never have brought it up, either.
But being in a room with a tiger, especially a tiger named Love, has a way of wearing people down. What began as a dance – a fragile, humbling dance – started to wend its way into something approximating frustration, or something we will at least for the purposes of this example label “frustration.” There came a point at which either the man or the woman, or both, started thinking, “This tiptoeing business is making my feet hurt.” For argument’s sake, let’s say on this occasion it was the man who became frustrated first, perhaps an immeasurably infinitesimal period of time before the woman. Perhaps longer?
So, after a time of the man being frustrated with the ridiculous ballet of mincing around the tiger named Love, Love the Tiger, he got adventurous and said to himself, “Oh, to hell with it,” and nudged the tiger with his toe, or coughed pointedly, or clapped hi s hands and stomped his feet and yodeled, yodeled, yodeled.
Now, the couple just had to deal with it. The tiger named Love awoke blinking, stretching, eyeing the two people standing anxious and vulnerable on either side of the room. Love was striated and sinewy, orange and black and eight hundred pounds of lethal, rippling muscle. This was a tiger with some seriously sharp claws and some severely pointed teeth. Alternating her gaze from the wakened tiger to the man, the woman would have been thinking, “Now why the hell did this idiot have to go and do that?” But she would also have been thinking, “Hey, a tiger – this could be a lot of fun.”
The man, meanwhile, would have to assume responsibility. Love the Tiger, like a nest of dormant wasps rattled to life by a child’s slingshot, with its innate sense for these sorts of things, knew who had disturbed its peaceful sleep. The tiger knew, the man knew, and most importantly, the woman knew. Love turned to the woman, the only person it could still trust, awaiting her instructions.
Then it would be a matter of the woman taming the tiger, maybe even getting the man on board to lend a hand. That, or reeling back in horror as the tiger systemically tore out both of their intestines with its killer claws and fangs. Glory or doom, the thrill of watching a luxuriant tiger prance around the room on it s hind legs, mewling contentedly, or the chilling prospect of ending up disemboweled and glassy-eyed on the floor.
This is the point where the metaphor breaks down somewhat. You see, Love is not a tiger at all. If you listen to the right music, it is a blossoming flower, a red rose spangled with dew. Love is not dangerous, unless you consider the thorns of a rose dangerous – but even those can be easily avoided, or clipped off by a well-trained florist. Unless you are the type of person who enjoys love with people who sell it, and you do not protect yourself with the shields of Trojan against the tigers of infectious disease, then there is little danger involved with Love, at all.
You see, I do not understand Love. I am not one of the great poets who can tell you what Love is like in fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in a rhyming scheme of ABAB ABAB CDE CDE, or something similar. I am just a man, and a reasonably small (five-foot-seven) man at that. I have claimed to be "in love" before, but in retrospect I feel as though I only wanted to avoid something disquieting, such as losing sleep.
I wish I could have used this space, your valuable time, when you have so much work to do, to have provided something illuminating, some glimmer of hope and truth in this black and bleak tiger’s maw of a world. But I cannot. I have failed. Love, I say – who are you? A tiger?
Seriously. Are you?
---
Pasha Malla lives in Montreal, a place without tigers, but a whole lot of love.
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