Love isn’t easy like Sunday morning.

Say love. If you don’t know what something means to begin with, is it possible to make it mean even less?

Try it. Love love love love love love love.

Say lust. Say sorrow. Say mother, and father.

Say God and be damned. It’s a stupid name for a supreme being anyway. And if you can kill god before breakfast someday then, perhaps then, there is hope for you. Because sending all of these names—of things and places and people and god—into the void is just practice for the only name that matters. The only name that has ever mattered. The one that wounds your heart and makes you soar. Like dancing on broken glass. Sure you bleed, but you’re still dancing, aren’t you? You can’t stop, and you can’t not.

Gehna.

Try it.

Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna Gehna

You can rub the shine off of most names by saying them a lot.

1

Eram first saw Gehna Rai through her brother’s aquarium.

Varun was twenty-three, which meant that he was proper grown, but it was hard to tell with him sometimes. He liked nothing so much as a good argument and he always took the contrary view: he was a Darwinist with animal lovers, a rabid bigot among liberals, pro-life with feminists, pro-choice with Catholics, he advocated gay marriage to conservatives and was a loyal supporter of whichever government happened to be in power.

He also liked to piss Gehna off, which was fun for him because she cared about things. People who cared were always easy to provoke.