Amabo Te: An Essay on Love and Begging

by Franny Marzuki
Illustration by Kerstin Stillman

(amo, amare, amavi, amatum v. meaning ‘to love,’
amabo te idiom. meaning ‘please;’ literal meaning ‘I will love you’)

In Latin, to ask something of another you must offer them your love.

/though this is imprecise as there are many verbs to ask, to beg/

To ask something of another—the way that we do in English, as a single word of entreaty added at the end of a request—you must offer them your love. I tell you this when the light is pinkening through your window. I chew on my nail. Everything is fresh and pulsing like a wound exposed. Still wet. Still throbbing. You barely look at me.

/though how selfish it is that I want you to look at me, to look at me, please, please, see me/

You wonder what kind of favor would warrant that type of begging of someone; you wonder how desperate you would need to be to offer up that much of yourself to another at a moment’s notice. Because you have never given parts of yourself away before. But I tell you that it would be much easier than you think. I tell you that love has always been an act of begging.

/though maybe, again, I’m being presumptuous, as I only have us to base ideas of love on/

Love is always a form of begging, I tell you again, because you never hear me if I say something once. I’ve gotten used to speaking in doubles.

The phrase amabo te can only be used in the singular, never made into the plural—you would never offer your love to more than one, amabo vos was non-existent in classical Latin. To plead is a conversation between only two, intimate like the insides of medicine cabinets. As whispers passed between bottoms of pill bottles.

/though many find it easy to love more than one at the same time, with a breadth wide and unending; unconditional/

When I tell you this, the nail I’m chewing rips unevenly. Leaving a thin transparence, a remaining piece of something once whole. You hum, preoccupied with other things more interesting than my erroneous etymology. Anything to you would be more interesting than my false science.

It’s much easier to believe that this is the nature of love. Desperate and clawing and begging. Because if that isn’t true, what do the two of us have? Some type of soured emotion, curdling and infectious. I wonder who was the one to spread it first.

/though I already know the answer you would give/

When we’re alone like this, I remember things I shouldn’t. Things that invert my heart and make my hands shake with want.

I remember the old you.

/though maybe it could still be you, if I weren’t me/

I remember we met when the sky was fresh, striking and sure in its color, not the fading lights we find ourselves settling in so often now. Then, you looked at me and said my eyes are brown, my hair is long, and my nose looks like it has a marble placed on its end. You looked at me and saw me. Back then, you knew what I meant before I even spoke. I had no need to use my double speech.

/though it’s hard to remember that, so hard to remember, that even in my mind I can barely think it/

In my imagination, old you would tell me what I want to hear. What I want you to tell me in this moment: that I’m wrong. Love has never been an act of begging, you would have said. You would have laughed a little, strained with pity. But I guess that you’re not completely wrong, you just have it backwards, you would have said.

To love someone is to be vulnerable. When you ask something of someone, you’re allowing them your weakness. You create a promise and you put your trust into another for them to fulfill that promise. You would have laughed again and reached out to pull my fingers away from my mouth. What’s more loving than that? You would have said. And I would have believed you.

/though you don’t say these things and I can’t bring myself to believe them; I still hide my mouth behind bitten nails/

I think about the fact that amabo te is in the future tense. I will love you. An action that declares continuation, to be unending.

I’ve bitten off my fingernails until there is nothing else to grab onto. You don’t look at me, just barely hearing me. I move to biting the top layer of skin off my fingertips until they are budding pink,

/though not striking enough to be red; a yearning/

just to have something to tear.