What is Love? Baby Don’t Hurt Me.

Love is a fact, not reserved for the lucky or mutually in love, or the sometimes lucky, sometimes mutually in love people. All I can tell you is what I know. That I have been in love, although way way way less than I’d expect – as if my heart is closed tightly and needs a clamp or a glimmer of light and hope or a superhero with super emotional strength to get that damn thing open – even just a little. To let the light in and hope it all opens up one day, or today. I’ve been in love way way way less than the number of people who have told me they were in love with me, and I’ve been in love way way way less than the amount of people I’ve been with. No facts there.

Just feelings and hope and stamina and lifeblood. What keeps us going? Why do some of us have it, and some of us don’t, and some have it halfway and some get it halfway and some take it halfway and some have it full force, to last half the time? Or half force and it lasts forever?

I thought I’d be an expert by now. I have all the tools. My grandparents lived to 100 and a half – dying two years apart from one another – but holding hands – tightly and fully, as if to say, “I’m never letting go, are you?” No. I remember them standing just like that – set against a vibrant Florida sunset – until we drove so far away that they were just a shadowed statue at that point, growing smaller by the turns of the tires. A statue, though. Don’t they last forever, or nearly? Dusted and crumbled and defaced and kicked and peed on – but standing, just the same?

That is love. In junior year Human Behavior class, we had to make a poster board project for what we thought love was. I can’t remember what other people did – although in my head they all cut out collages of flowers and kissing brides from magazines. Surely, they didn’t, but I love to remember myself as especially deep. That said, I was proud of my project. My little A+ that made the teacher stop in her tracks. That was me. My poster followed a slightly scientific, slightly magical approach with all the different types of love. Obsessive, lust, familial, unconditional.

Pure. Innocent. I filled that poster with dried flowers and photos I had taken. Counting Crows song lyrics too. Always a writer and a photographer. I had never really been in love but I knew a few things. It’s as rich and complex and varied as the people in this world. There’s a different type of love for every person in this world, multiplied against every other person in this world.

Love is a little science and a lot of magic, or a lot of science and a little magic. Maybe it’s equal parts science and magic, sprinkled with hope and strength and choices. Love is romantic love, unconditional love, pure love, familial love, friendship love, self love, erotic love, affectionate love, familiar love, playful love, obsessive love, enduring love, and spiritual, selfless love, which will probably save us all one day, right? So we can stop feeling so doomed? Maybe that’s just me.

What is love? Love is..

• A battlefield.

• A ghost train, rumbling through the darkness.

• And a ghost train, howling on the radio.

• Love makes you feel addicted, according to neuroscience.

• Maybe even obsessed.

• And you definitely experience recklessness.

• But oh, what you do with those feelings, and how long they last. THAT, is the magic.

• Love feels like a blur – what is reality, anyway?

_ Love and lust can coexist and maybe even for different people at once, but it’s so much better when they go hand in hand like a chocolate dipped peanut butter cookie. It’s love dipped in lust.

• Love is dried roses, pressed in a book.

• Love is selfless.

• It’s an infectious disease.

• Love is a choice – to stay in it and build it up even when it seems easier and faster to tear it down and start fresh.

• Love is everything I ever looked for – times a million – and much more achy, nauseating and joyful than even my wildest dreams imagined. It’s what I’ve always wanted and what I’ll be seeking a higher of until the very end, wherever and whatever that may be. The end.

“And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make” — The Beatles

I’m linking up with Finish The Sentence Friday (FTSF) for another great prompt. This week’s topic is “Love.. (a free-write)” And there’s still time to write yours. Link up your post HERE.