Lovesickness

Translated from the Persian original.

Love isn't a known, discovered disease, but I've heard they're something like worms that start multiplying in the cavities of the brain. And it's not as if there are only one or two cavities, so you could imagine that so-and-so put a worm in there and left, and you know where it is and can tear it out like a pigeons' nest by the window so they won't wake you up in the mornings anymore. Only the one who put the worms there knows where they are, and they're the one who has to come and do something about them. That's why, as long as they're around, tending to them, you're fine. Because worms don't talk; they make no noise at all. But as soon as the worm-keeper puts them there and leaves, the worms get hungry. First they start on the smaller ones, then little by little they start eating the walls of the cavities. You start to pine, you end up at the doctor's, but as I said, no one but the worm-keeper knows where the worms are. The doctor gives you poison to pour into the cracks and walls of your head so the worms will die, but this poison also gets fed to the rest of the worms, and to what others have planted. Sometimes you feel you have nothing left of anyone. And here again there are two pains. First, these worms are more dangerous dead than alive, because your head, the part where the worms die, starts to rot, and there's no one left to tend to it; the new worm-keepers go after new cavities. My dear, the worms you put in my head before you left, I've kept alive by every trick there is. By this sign: the cavity was shaped like a star and gave off your own perfume. I found it by the scent of your perfume.

If you're asking about the worms, they're well and multiplying; and if you're asking about me, I'm a little garden of longing with nothing in its soil but worms.

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