WHEN BLOOD LEARNS TO LOVE, An Essay from the Backroom of Creation

Photo: Ganiarov Publishers LLC

WHEN BLOOD LEARNS TO LOVE

An Essay from the Backroom of Creation

No novel begins on a page. It begins earlier — in the tremor that provokes it.
For years, I carried in silence a question that haunted me like a voice that refused to fade:
Where does love come from when it is born from pain?
That is my obsession — love in all its manifestations.
It wasn’t a theoretical question, but a visceral one. I had seen how love, in its purest or most perverse forms, could destroy as much as it could redeem.
And I knew then that I could only write about what hurt me to understand.

That is how When Blood Learns to Love was born: from unease, from a nameless guilt, from the certainty that even tenderness can become an act of cruelty when it rests upon an unhealed wound.

Every act of creation is a postponed confession. One does not write because one knows, but because one bleeds.
When I began sketching the story, I wasn’t seeking to build a thriller or a plot driven by intrigue, but a space where morality became unstable — a territory where every human gesture confronted its own shadow.
I soon discovered that the shadow was not separate from me.

There are wounds that do not belong to an individual biography but to a species. Violence, possession, the need for redemption — all these traverse the history of mankind, but also our private histories.
Writing, then, became a way of dissecting that collective wound through the intimate voices of my characters.
They did not know how to love; they were learning. Yet within that learning there was a form of expiation — a clumsy attempt to reconcile desire with guilt.
I did not wish to write about love as a feeling, but as a battlefield.
Because to love, in certain moments, is not to kiss or to save; it is to endure without killing what one loves.
And that tension sustains the novel — at the frontier where life becomes unbearable, yet one chooses to keep breathing.

If I were asked what philosophy runs through the book, I would say none explains it, yet all of them cross it.
In When Blood Learns to Love there is no doctrine, only vertigo.
The work begins from an ancient premise: man does not know himself except through love — but love confronts him with the worst of himself.
I wrote from within that dialectic — Eros and Thanatos, desire and death — without seeking equilibrium.
Love does not redeem; it unveils.
And in that unveiling, the human being stands naked before his abyss.

I was obsessed with the idea that every act of love implies a moral choice, even when that choice hides beneath impulse.
In the novel, the characters love not because they must, but because they cannot help it.
Yet that love, far from saving them, leads them to recognize themselves as guilty, vulnerable, human.
That is where their truth resides: in fragility, in the incapacity to master their own shadow.
There is a line that accompanied me while writing:

“Blood remembers what the mind denies.”

Perhaps that is why I wrote the novel in a feverish and lucid tone — where every word seeks not so much to explain as to remember.

Every story that explores darkness risks being devoured by it.
I had to enter cautiously.
I wanted the psychology of the characters not to be a catalogue of pathologies, but a mirror of the human soul in its limit state.
I was not interested in describing trauma, but in showing how trauma reorganizes desire.
That is why the characters love with the violence of survivors: they do not expect calm — they seek fusion, absolution, or annihilation.

While writing, I realized that love, in its most extreme forms, is indistinguishable from fear.
Both force us to surrender control, to expose ourselves.
That is why the book carries a constant tension, a rhythm that pulses between whisper and scream.
I wanted the reader to feel that every sentence could explode.

There is no redemption without memory.
And there is no memory without pain.
The characters learn this in their own way — stumbling, lying, searching in flesh for a truth their souls cannot bear to name.
That is the essence of their learning: to understand that love cannot be taught — it can only be survived.

Some believe prose and poetry are two separate roads. I have never believed that.
In this novel, language is as important as plot.
Each sentence had to contain a vibration, a crack, a music.
Language became my way of resisting the rawness of the story.
If the narrative descended into darkness, the word had to hold a small flame.
I did not write to provoke morbid curiosity or to describe horror, but to observe it with the lucidity of one who refuses to look away.
Horror, when named precisely, loses part of its power.
And beauty, when it appears amid pain, does not console — it reveals.

That is why, even in the darkest passages, I sought a lyrical tone.
Not to beautify suffering, but to give it a human, breathable voice.
I believe poetry does not save, but gives meaning.
And while writing When Blood Learns to Love, I felt that each paragraph was an attempt to reconcile myself with the lost beauty of the world.

There are loves that are not born from desire, but from the need to understand the other.
In the novel, love is not a refuge but a risk.
The characters draw close knowing they might destroy one another — yet also knowing that closeness is their only way to exist fully.
I wanted to explore that edge where tenderness and violence blur.
Where kissing and wounding become neighboring gestures.
In that sense, the novel is also an essay on empathy.
How can one love someone who embodies harm?
How can one look without judging, touch without possessing, forgive without forgetting?
Those questions accompanied me throughout the writing process.

And I discovered that love, in its most radical form, is not an act of purity but of courage.
To love is, at times, to descend into the abyss with the other — and not flee.
To accept that within each of us there is a part that can destroy and another that can heal — and that both are inseparable.

I did not write this novel to teach anything.
I wrote it to understand something that I could not express otherwise.
Each chapter was a masked confession, a fragmented mirror of my own relationship with guilt, loss, and tenderness.
There were moments when I felt fear — fear of what the text revealed about me, fear of the zones where morality turns ambiguous.
But I understood that art does not exist to soothe us — it exists to unsettle us, with beauty.

Sometimes people ask me if the story is autobiographical.
I always answer the same: every story is, even when it doesn’t seem so.
Because the writer does not invent — he transforms.
And every written word comes from something lived, felt, or feared.
In that silent backroom — between dawns and pauses — I discovered that to write about love was also to write about solitude.
That every passion carries within it a void, a place where the self dissolves.
And that perhaps love is nothing more than that: a way of reminding ourselves that we are not complete.

Every book has its own breathing.
The one in When Blood Learns to Love was irregular, fevered.
At times I wrote in staccato rhythm — short, wounded, precise phrases.
Other times the prose slowed, almost hypnotic, as if it needed to pause the pulse to observe the open wound.
That ebb and flow between tension and stillness was essential.
Because love itself beats like that: a moment of calm followed by a storm.
There is no harmony without risk, no tenderness without loss.
The language had to reflect that breathing.
I treated every silence, every pause, as part of the meaning.

The novel does not seek to explain; it seeks to resonate.
And whoever reads it, rather than understanding it, feels it.

One of the central axes of the story is the body — the body as a territory of memory, of desire, of redemption.
I wanted to show how the body preserves what the mind denies, how skin sometimes remembers more than words.
Guilt inscribes itself on the body — in gestures, in glances, in the tremor of a hand.
That is why the characters cannot escape themselves.
Each caress is a confession; each silence, a sentence.

Blood — the metaphor that gives the book its title — is, at its core, the substance of the soul.
When blood learns to love, it does so because it has known pain.
And in that learning lies something profoundly human: the possibility of transforming suffering into consciousness.

I believe love is a form of knowledge.
Not rational knowledge, but that which is attained by risking the soul.
In the novel, the characters do not learn from the world; they learn from each other.
Love becomes a mirror, a judgment, and a revelation.
Each encounter of love is a moral laboratory — where pleasure mingles with guilt, and forgiveness merges with surrender.
And yet, in the midst of that confusion, a clarity emerges:
love is not the opposite of evil — it is its frontier.

That frontier is what obsesses me as a writer.
Because in it, the human being becomes sharper, truer.
No one loves without exposure.
No one is saved without facing the harm they are capable of causing.

When I finished the novel, I understood it no longer belonged to me.
It belongs to those who read it and recognize within its pages something they didn’t know they carried inside.
Each reader will reconstruct the story in their own way — because love, like literature, only exists when someone interprets it.

I did not seek to offer answers, but questions that wound.
What part of us survives after love?
And what part is lost forever?
Can tenderness redeem what pain has desecrated?

Writing this novel was my way of saying yes — but not in the way we might wish.
Because redemption does not erase the wound; it illuminates it.
And in that light — sometimes faint, sometimes blinding — I understood that to love is the most dangerous and most necessary act that exists.

When Blood Learns to Love is, in the end, a mirror.
One in which I look and do not always recognize myself — but from which I cannot look away.
Because there, between darkness and beauty, between guilt and desire, continues to beat the only thing that makes us human: the need to love, even knowing that such love may destroy us.

Gabriel Ganiarov