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You might ask how deep my understanding of love was at the age of nineteen. A court of law might find it based on a few books and films, conversations with friends, heady dreams, aching fantasies about certain girls on bicycles and a quarter-relationship with the first woman I went to bed with. But my nineteen-year old self would correct the court: 'understanding' love is for later, 'understanding' love verges on practicality, 'understanding' love is for when the heart has cooled. The lover, in rapture, doesn't want to 'understand' love, but to experience it, to feel the intensity, the coming-into-focus of things, the acceleration of life, the entirely justifiable egotism, the lustful cockiness, the joyful rant, the calm seriousness, the hot yearning, the certainty, the simplicity, the complexity, the truth, the truth, the truth of love. Truth and love, that was my credo. I love her and I see the truth. It must be that simple