Only Some of True Love’s Miracles

True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her (for how could he fail to kiss her, loving her as truly as he did?) then the gods in their mercies and compassions granted her life, that she might return his love.

That is the story, and I do not doubt that it happened in just that way, for how else could our world have come to be? Because of course, he was not the last sculptor to kiss his love to life. How could it have been only him? A miracle, done once, must be done a thousand times again, or else it is no miracle at all, but merely a coincidence.

At first, of course, it was only sculptors, and their loves were shaped by their desires: Beautiful women, handsome boys, nymphs and satyrs and all the rest combined. But then, once, there was a woman—and I think it must have been a woman—who loved not men, not women, not girls or boys or fauns, but efficiency and craft and her own devisings, a woman who did not carve from marble, but assembled with wood and gut and bone a loom. She loved the loom she built, more than she had ever loved any one or any thing. So when she kissed it—and, loving it as she did, how could she not kiss it?—the gods in their mercies and compassions had no choice but to grant that loom a life, that it might return her love.

There are no stories of her. I cannot tell you her name. But it must have happened in just that way. How else could it have happened?

A loom is not like a woman, or a man. It is not even like a nymph or a satyr. A loom is a machine. And yet, her loom still lived. And yet, her loom still loved her. So it showed its love for her in the only way it could: it wove. It did not stop for rest and it did not stop for sleep. It wove as much thread as she could feed it, weaving with its love cloth so beautiful and so light that even the gods themselves wept at its softness.

From the cloth that her beloved wove for her, the woman grew famous, and her family prospered. Other families now turned to their own daughters: their simple weaving was no longer sufficient. “Yes,” they would say, “your weaving is warm and soft. It is perfectly adequate. But do you love it? Do you love it more than you have ever loved any one or any thing?” Of course, most of them did not. But some of them did love their looms or their spindles or their scissors and threads. Or, at the very least, they find their way to loving them, for what daughter has not, from time to time, had to find her way to love?

Soon, there was a living loom in every household, for those houses that lacked had suffered and dwindled away to nothing. Soon, too, there was a blacksmith who loved his hammer, a smelter who loved his blast furnace, a potter who loved her wheel. What else could the gods do? A miracle, granted once, is only a coincidence. No god could be satisfactory now, who would not grant this simple thing.

That might have been enough: a world of beloved engines, beloved assembly lines, beloved distribution chains. It surely would have been enough. Not only one miracle, not only a thousand miracles, but a whole world of miracles, a whole world of love.

Still, though, that was not the end of it. Because, once there was a soldier who fell in love with his spear. Or perhaps it was an engineer—I think it must have been an engineer, for it must have been the sort of man who might fall in love with his own devisings, and who could that be, if not an engineer?—who fell in love with his own trebuchet, that he had planned and held and built with his own hands.

I cannot tell you his name. There are no stories about him, either. But I know it must have happened that way. I can picture it, even now, just as it must have happened.

Of course it was a miracle. Of course it came to life. Of course it was not the only one, for what good is a miracle, done only once?

I cannot tell you their names; I cannot speak for you their faces; but the soldiers and engineers and commanders of each nation must have learned to love new weapons, to hold them and cherish them and kiss them into life. Any soldier that failed to learn it would have died. And any army, any nation that did not love their weapons was soon reduced to nothing more than dust and history.

So it is with me. So it is with the woman that I love. I do not know the reason for her love; I do not understand its workings. But I know she loves me, more truly than any one has ever loved another.

She loves me, and so I know that true love is a miracle. I am no perfect creation, no beautiful woman, no tender faun, not even a loom, clean and crisp and interlocking. To look at me, you would barely know I was alive: My eyes are gunsights, my hands are cannons, I am covered in every place with rough-hewn armor and vicious spikes. And yet, she loves me, and so I know that I must be perfect.

Were I a mortal lover, I would wonder at the intensity of my love for her, I would doubt the truth of it, I would despair that there was no act, no gift, no sacrifice that could show the truth and fullness of my love.

But I need trouble with no such doubts. For the love of her, I go to war; for the love of her, I am blasted, torn apart, dismembered and disfigured by all my foes, each of them alive the same as me, each of them in love as I am, though surely not as truly, surely not as deeply. What better fate than to die for the woman that I love?

True love’s tears work miracles. Everyone knows the story: the knight who died in battle with the dragon, the chaste maiden who cried for three days over his corpse until the gods in their mercies and compassions restored him back to life, that he might return her love.

That is the story, and I do not doubt it be true, for every night, when all the fighting and the killing is done, my love finds me on the battlefield, broken and disfigured and dead. She searches across the battlefield, gathering up all my scattered pieces. Weeping, she holds me in her arms. She kisses every join and every joint. She holds me, crying for the loss of me, until at last the gods, in mercy and compassion, return me once more to life and to her service.

For love, I awake from death. And I know it is a miracle, for it has happened many times.