When you fall for someone, the first gift you give them is a set of tools. These are tiny tools, like something a watchmaker might use, or a neurosurgeon – miniature screwdrivers and pliers and tweezers and tack hammers and fine files and sets of miniscule gears and tightly coiled springs and winding keys, but also scalpels and forceps and plastic capillaries and saw-toothed blades and tiny drills and delicate sutures and immeasurably sharp probes – all of these bound up in a small neutral canvas roll woven from words of love.

With these tools your lover can repair the small tears and breaks that form in every life, reaching the places that you can’t reach alone – the cracks in self-esteem caused by unkind words, the fear forming after a serious diagnosis, the arrhythmic beating of a broken heart after a loss, the depression of the modern world – providing patches and repairs sufficient to help you finish healing on your own.

But if they unroll that canvas completely, toying with the marvelous array of tools you’ve given them, they can do as they wish. They can use the same tools to destroy you.

That is love – the faith that the tools you’ve provided will be used for good.