On love
It’s very difficult for me to write about love. I think it is one emotion in which I still feel very new, in which I am unsteady, in which I am a small bird shivering out on a thin, weak branch. Anger, sadness, appreciation, awe, fear; these are all much easier for me to sink into. I can envelop myself in these emotions and untangle them within myself and then write about them with depth and clarity. But love, or how to write about it in a sufficient way, eludes me even though I feel that it often wracks my body fully.
And so my musings on love are these:
We met exactly when we needed to. Any earlier, and he would’ve been added to my list of handsome, avoidant, deeply unserious men. Any earlier, and we would’ve been too invested and too easily spooked off, too avoidant and too attached. We met with just enough time. Our first date was 8 hours long and we forgot to kiss. Our second date was 14 hours long and he says he fell in love with me; though I suspect this is revisionist history, I hope he never tells me the truth. He’s got a soft voice that is reserved just for me, for when we are laying in bed late at night or early in the morning. He is most handsome when he is being smart, or when he is telling me that I am special or that I am different. He tells me all the time that I am different to him, and I believe it, even though I’m still not quite sure what that means. Even though I was so convinced for so long that he would leave me, as they always did. When I began seeing my boyfriend, I wrote this (in the second person, but not necessarily written to him) about the first time that we were honest with each other:
“I can’t sleep because I am terrified that you are going to take it all back. In fact, I am certain that in the morning, after you slip out of the door, you will come to your senses. Even when you wake up, and the first thing you say is, “I want you” I am so scared that all I can say in return is, “still?” Because it’s the morning now and we said all those things in the dark and it’s easier to say those things when you don’t have to look them in the eyes. You nod, and after you vanish off to work the next day, I still can’t sleep. I can’t imagine ever sleeping again.”
There is love in the way that he stayed and continues to stay even when (from my own anxieties and paranoia) I am not sure that he will. It is in the permanence that I feel exists, the repeated way that he has promised this permanence; the weight of it that is there. There is a weight, a beautiful heaviness, a blanket that we are weaving together, with all four hands, that will slowly cover us for our whole lives.
If hope is the thing with feathers, love is– perhaps unable to be contained within one metaphor. He is a tree and I am a small rabbit tucked into one of its hollows, and we stay warm in that way. I am a wooden post and he is a vine twisting around me, and then I am the starving bug that feasts on the vine’s leaves. I am coffee, he is cream, and then we take sips of the drink together.
We are from both chance and choice. And sometimes, when I look at him, I am astonished that someone so like him has made me the choice, out of all the options in the world.
I will leave these musings with a final excerpt of something I wrote when we began seeing each other:
“I imagine that maybe one day these things will feel normal, they will be things that aren’t so novel to me. Eventually I will come to expect that he is sweet and that he is gentle, I will not be surprised at the softness in his fingers on my arm. But for now these things are still new and wondrous and I think, actually, that they likely always will be.”
PS- I love you.
