Don't ask me what it means to love someone. As I can tell you from experience, I throw the word "love" away like they were colorful strings of beads at a Mardigras Parade, abundant and seductive but no one throws them back.
Love is a feeling I have always understood as something that is omnipresent. Not once did I believe in money making the world go round, but I believed it was love that propelled us all to keep moving forward, keep the earth dancing in awkward circles. We love the sun so much we spin around it. It loves us back enough to embrace us in it's gravity and keep us from spiraling into the deep abyss of space, from colliding with other heavenly bodies. I think the Earth fell in love with the fickle moon a long time ago that I refused to let it go. Their mutual love for each other keeps the tides turning, making the oceans weep when time comes when the moon has to disappear for a while. Once upon a time the sun fell in love with the moon that day after day He chases after Her, knowing he will never be able to catch her. Love is why, in beautiful and nostalgic synchronization with the earth, we crane our necks in tandem with the ground beneath our feet in order to drink in the sparkling stars, the languorous nebulae, endless skies.
For years there has been a struggle to find this elusive creature, this champion's prize of life. This is my lost treasure, the rare blue butterfly. I try my very hardest to capture it and keep it in my hands but love is a viscous creature that bites and scratches, fickle and changes its mind. It grows tired and weary, the firefly that flickers in and out of light. The journey towards it is plagued with dangers: false prophets that guide you in cruel misdirection, the twisted forms of evil that mimic the drug, the broken hearts that litter the road and the miles of distance you have to walk until your tired feet bring you to where you and he will meet.
I beg you, do not ask me to define love! I am the one who does not know what it is because I recognize it all too well and fall in love four times each morning and six times each evening. I fall in love with the world in the quiet of that space between sleep and waking, the moment that blurs on the border between the darkest hour of night and the first light of dawn. I fall in love with the green spirit of mother nature in the rustling of trees, the complex patterns in the colors of flowers and at the same time, I fall in love with ugly urban cities-- love it for all it's decrepit, urban decay. I love it's slow deterioration.
I love people, too. I love the boy in the coffee shop corner with his nose buried in a book. I love the mother when she calls her child that nickname only they share. I love it when people are kind and loving, and sweet and caring. I love it when I see their faces when they realize that they are a whole part of something bigger, a cog in the machine that is the world. I love then when they are sad or hurt in my smiles and warm hugs, just to make them feel less lonely when they are. I love them when they need a little bit of a reprieve from the hopelessness that pervades the very air we breath. I love them at their best and at their worst for people are just melancholic souls, restless feet and sentimental hearts that beat in unison with the cars that honk, the bass that plays and the atoms that give life and energy.
Is that not what love is? Is it not supposed to be kind? Is it not supposed to go above and beyond the ordinary, the boring and go borderline insane? It should be maddened with lust and passion, fueled by hope and everlasting desire. Should it not be allowed to be happy when it is and morose when it needs to? Lovers should understand that love is never constant but that lovers should, like vines that intertwine, hold fast and have an impending and irrefutable fear of losing and letting go.
Do not ask me what is love because I know its many faces and its many forms. Do not ask me about love because each one is different, and each one is uniquely yours.
Not a poem, but an essay! hooray!