Painterly two dark hands reaching together above a small flame in a brass dish.

Original artwork, not a still

Amores

Ovid

So I can’t live either without you or with you.

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

The speaker admits being caught in a bind of love: being apart from the beloved is unbearable, yet being together is unbearable too. It captures the exhausted contradiction of an attachment that offers no comfortable arrangement, only a choice between two kinds of suffering.

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