These words are a person mid-swoon, stacking up oddball images to say one simple thing: I am crazy about you. The attraction is loud and uncomplicated, all sweetness and goofy metaphor, the narrator delighted to have found someone who feels like his kind. He wants it seen, wants the whole world in on it. Nothing gets examined and nothing needs to. The feeling is the whole point.

Hear it and the early rush of liking someone gets a soundtrack, the giddy stretch where everything they do looks charming. It hands back the harmless silliness of a crush, the part that makes you talk in nonsense. It hits warmest for anyone in the first glow of something and reads as sugar to anyone past it. There is nothing underneath to hold onto later, but it is not trying to give you that. It is trying to make you grin.

Run this through millions and infatuation gets installed as the standard picture of love: the chemical first month, the giddy wish to broadcast a new pairing to everyone in range. The program holds up the swoon as the main event, the part of romance worth singing about. It says little about what a bond becomes once the novelty cools, because the novelty is the subject. A culture humming this learns to recognize love mostly by its opening rush.

What flatlines is the vocabulary for the long middle. People get fluent at the giddy start and stay amateur at the patient years, since the giddy start is the only chapter the program rehearses. Couples past the glow can read their own steadiness as a loss rather than an arrival. The cost is small and the program is gentle, but a steady diet of openings quietly teaches a population to chase the next first month instead of building the tenth year.