EX

Preposition EX, from the Latin ‘out of’, commonly used in Anglophone countries to refer to goods sold direct. Special price for these, my chum, just between you and me. ex is commercial talk, leading to ex gratia payment mayhaps methinks, geographical lingo which finds its way onto many an Indoeuropean tongue. Where did it start? From the mouth of an amphitheatre watcher to the ear of a senatus attender, in one of the Roman baths, where experts met to dissect the past and future in the eternity of a steam infused present. Historical, then. Would have been as widely used in an elusory then as it is in our palpable now. BUT! Who came up with the term? What was it meant to convey, to stand for, to connote? We wind our tongue around this slippery hissing whisper kiss of a sound. Out. Of. Now, give me the bag and source out exit, excellent, exquisite, exceptional, exclusive, exotic, exciting.

Let us expand the topic. Alone, I would wager the sound passes lips quite often to refer to those who have joined the ranks of past loves—may they never recover, the wretched. Exes, after all, are exact examples of what we have crossed off the list. Shall we? Yes, let’s exaggerate their flaws and the misery caused in order to validate the existing decision, expedite recovery. We tell ourselves that the land of our souls are richer without their expat presence, their exoglossic sweet-nothing-forever-love. Be gone! we expel, exile, exorcise their every tender gesture, exonerate the power of their minds from our present. We settle back expectantly to watch the expansionisms of our minds (and bodies) without them.

For mankind is cruel, and once we realise the problems highlighted by those refugees come-in-not-so-profitable dinghies, we kick them back into the sea. We have loved but no longer, and so our land goes back to its migrantless barren waste.

But love, even defeated, is not expendable. It was, so it is, and any extra-judicial libel cannot change that fact. You never exercise the right to treat an other being as expired. Experience gives you no claim to experiment with expletives, exacerbations or explicit descriptions when referring to a person whose love ran out, even should they have revealed themselves as shameful or shameless. Your love is suspended in time, as written in the past as latin roots, not an excuse to disrespect them. You must expiate your defeated love, and dedicate yourself to the extraordinary ups and downs that life is responsible for.