cursive jetty
*— Tell me something: what makes love love?
— That’s quite a question, huh? I have no idea… Maybe the butterflies in the stomach people always talk about? Or, I don’t know, that indescribable look when two lovers lock eyes.
— Good guesses, they really are. I mean… kind of utopian, don’t you think? Too perfect for the most chaotic of all feelings. Have you ever felt love burning on your skin? Doesn’t seem like it. Not a single tear in your eyes. Was I really that insensitive? Whatever. Try again what makes love be love?
— Love itself feels utopian. All that shared emotion, those accepted declarations and poems scattered everywhere, kisses in unexpected places, hugs that never end, conversations that change your whole day, the calm of revealing your fears and demons on cloudy afternoons, smiles that become purposes, the longing to be someone’s only one… maybe that’s what love is, right? What makes love love… maybe it’s all of that.
— Look at you there was poetry in you all along. But as I said, that’s just poetry. You got close, but that’s still not it. Try again.
— What makes you think you know me so well? Why do you keep asking me that?
— Please, just answer. What makes love love?
— … I don’t know, okay? I think it’s fear. There are so many kinds of love.
There are dreams never spoken out loud.
There are loves that never give themselves again after being hurt so deeply.
There are loves that overflow after all, some people love too much, others love too little.
There are unrequited loves, and flaws in every one of them.
There are loves that don’t even make sense to exist anymore.
And there are confusing loves like, honestly, all of them are.
What makes love love?
I have no idea.
Maybe love is this:
A song a heavenly orchestra, out of tune and messy.
Love is the foot that steps outside the door of comfort.
It’s the extreme of a feeling.
It’s the greatest of human sins the kind you only live once, and the rest is a failed attempt to forget it with more love… and so, to sin again.
Love is the greatest artwork we’ve ever seen,
the kind of painting that not even Van Gogh’s eyes could blur away.
Love… love is unique, tireless, uncontrollable.
It longs to love but more than that, it longs to be accepted.
In other words:
what makes love love… is chaos.
It’s when it’s truly loved back.
— Bingo. That’s it. Love is that.
An explosion.
This longing of yours to be loved that’s love itself, nothing more, nothing less.
Real love.
The idealization and the very idea,
the concept and the dispossession,
the desire, the fear, the craving,
the collection of reasons and pleasures —
that’s what loving means.
So humanly chaotic and fleeting
that I’m already tired of it.*
outer crater
prisma trail
old bramble