In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes describes love as a return to humanity’s original nature. He says “the original human nature was not like the present,” (Plato, 9) because there was a race of humans that was a “union” (11) of man and woman. This being was utterly whole, and in its wholeness it threatened the Gods, who divided these humans in two. Since that point, we have spent our lives following “the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.” (54-55) Pablo Neruda’s poem “Serenade” illustrates this craving. He, too, sees his lover as a part of himself, which he finds “when I seek within me,” (Neruda, 1-2) but the lover is an unknown part of himself, such that Neruda becomes “like a blind man in my own territory.” (9) For both Neruda and Plato, love requires a discovery of past loss. Neruda describes his lover as “unfathomable in your origin;” (13) in the lover he sees the origin of man that, according to Plato, “having a name…once had a real existence but is now lost.” (11-12) For Neruda, this origin is unfathomable because it is “nameless,” (Neruda, 24) and exists only as a memento of what has been lost. Lovers cannot, therefore, name “what they desire of one another,” (Plato, 74) but have “only a dark and doubtful presentiment.” (77) Like a shadow, Neruda’s love “builds [the lover’s] absence,” (Neruda, 16) because the discovery of the lover also requires the discovery of the emptiness within Neruda: the missing half of himself. In love one becomes aware of not only the lover’s presence and the completion it brings, but also the absence of the whole within oneself. To fall in love, therefore, is both a celebration and a belated mourning.