The best poem ever written about loving someone who is bad for you is fourteen words long.
Catullus wrote it around 55 BCE. In English it runs to two lines:
I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask? I don't know, but I feel it happening, and I am tortured.
That's the entire poem. No scene, no story, no name. Just the contradiction, stated flatly, and an admission that he can't explain it.
The word at the end
The final Latin word is excrucior.
It's built from crux — cross. Literally, it means "I am crucified." Catullus is not saying he's upset. He's saying he is being executed, slowly, on a device built for the purpose.
And that word is where our word excruciating comes from. Every time someone describes a pain as excruciating, they are unknowingly quoting a Roman poet's description of a bad relationship.
Who Lesbia was
The poems are addressed to a woman Catullus calls Lesbia — a pseudonym, in tribute to Sappho of Lesbos. Most scholars identify her with Clodia Metelli, an aristocratic Roman woman, married, and considerably above his station.
The affair produced about twenty-five poems, and they move through the full arc: giddy infatuation, jealousy, humiliation, contempt, and then back to helpless devotion. Odi et amo sits in the middle of that wreckage and describes it in fourteen words.
Why it still works
Because it refuses to explain itself. Catullus doesn't justify the contradiction or resolve it. He just reports it: this is happening to me, I don't know why, and it's killing me.
Two thousand years later, nobody has improved on it.
Wear it
Our Odi et Amo tee carries a split-heart motif with the phrase in Latin and English, and the complete couplet on the back. Printed in dark ink on light garment-dyed cotton — and it works equally well as a love poem or a breakup poem.
We at Palimpsest Tees also acknowledge the tradegy in Berlin for CSD. Celebrate and be proud.