love surgery: the best worst feeling in the world

Imagine you've got something perfect in your hands, and then you realize it's too... much. Too long, too large, too complex. It's perfect but it can't stay as it is or you won't be able to send it to where you intended it to go. It won't fit in its intended hole. It's too X to go into Y.

So you take a knife and cut it. Call it love surgery. You slice and splice and replace and resurface. You make it shorter, smaller, less complicated. Less perfect, and yet somehow more. Things whirl back into place, stronger for the shrinkage, somehow. The shiny parts get brighter and the darker parts get blacker. Everything is more for being less.

What was once perfect is now not as perfect, but somehow better. Or maybe it's not better, but it's somehow more perfect than before. The symphony's become a catchy, three-minute pop song that says everything you wanted the symphony to say, only in a lot less time, and with a jangly sugar guitar lick you can't help but smile at.

Because it wouldn't be there if you hadn't put it there on the re-do. If you hadn't loved it enough to rip it apart and put it back together again. If you hadn't gotten your hands bloody.

It's the best worst feeling in the world, that is.

(That and learning the high school crush you've been pining over for years, who took your heart and stomped on it by just wanting to be "friends" and dating a string of loser boyfriends, later turned out to be a baby-eating Martian psycho-killer who left a trail of bodies, crashed cars and weird body-part "art" between Columbus and Cambodia. But we're not going to talk about her, now. Because she might bust out of prison and come get us. And that would be bad, Bad, BAD.)