What is the difference between love and devotion?

Love is passive, it is involuntarily held. The lover may contain their love within themselves despite the pain it causes them. Devotion is almost arcane in its activeness. Rituals, enshrinement, and prayer exude from the devoted toward their subject in a manner that is disturbing in its directness.

There is an inherent humanity to love as well, a conceptual and physical grounding. But the weight of devotion is inhuman in its sacredness. The devoted must obscure the humanity of their subject in a way the lover does not dare to. Love may shadow the humanity of its subject like a clouded sky, but devotion is an eclipse.

Devotion also carries the weight of predation, a lack of the mutualness that love implies. It is voyeuristic, chaining, vaguely impure - love, by contrast, is engaging and inviting in its expression. There is a belittling nature to devotion that lifts its subject to a place that is necessarily high above the devoted. The devoted wrings humanity from their subject in untamed fits of voraciousness, they suck their subject dry and replace what they consume with their own obsessive thoughts.

For the subject of devotion, there is no escape. There is no detangling oneself from the worship of another. However, one who is loved may find themselves able to disengage by asserting their humanity, their boundaries, their ire... the lover cannot stop loving, but their love can be smothered in a way that devotion cannot be.