I want to write about love, but I don’t know if love wants to be written about. I don’t know what love wants, or if it wants anything at all; maybe it just is, without want, without need. Maybe we need it more than we know, but we’re wrong in the way we want it, the way we go about getting it. And when it feels like love resists us: the truth is, I think, that sometimes it’s us who resist love. We stay blind to it while ostensibly looking, and we look in the wrong places, when love can be found wherever we look.
I’m beginning to understand that love is bigger that all that: all of our lovesongs and our romantic notions, the clothes we dress it in and the definitions we write up, the stick we measure it against, ceremonies and rituals, our ends and our beginnings, the petty arguments and all of our broken hearts. Bigger than our plays and our poetry, our games and the strategies we use to capture the incapturable, too big to fit into our little box of a human mind, because it’s not in the mind that love is felt, and love is felt, not thought about. But smaller, too, tiny, the most subtle of things, like when something clicks inside you in response to a hand on your back, like the relief you feel when you sit in a room with a man, doing nothing of any importance. Like the scent of the sea or the gentle sigh of a breeze on a summer afternoon, or a smile that smashes everything and then puts it back together before you’ve had the chance to notice. So small that you could miss it if you don’t pay attention, if you insist on looking for things that seem appropriately big; if you keep focusing your gaze elsewhere and thinking with your mind and finding only spaces empty of love, while the sea scents your skin and the breeze is in your hair and a smile is in motion that could smash everything, if only you’d lift your gaze and see. If only you’d notice what’s right in front of you.
I spent fifteen years in love. It was a love so big that it contained me, that it contained everything I was. It was big enough to give me freedom within its margins, but it had margins, still, like everything has. I saw nothing of the world outside. I had no interest in what was out there. But there’s a reason why they say you fall in love, and there’s a reason why they talk of falling out of it. I stumbled, and I fell: out of love, outside of the margins, and I lifted my gaze and I saw. The love was still there, but I was out of it. My love, my big love will always be there, but it no longer contains me. I am too big, as it turns out; I have outgrown the margins it imposed. Or perhaps I’m the wrong shape for it, with parts of who I am sticking out at awkward angles. But the world outside has no fixed shape; just like love itself, it resists definition. And that’s freedom outside the margins: when you begin to notice what’s in front of you. When you allow yourself to feel.
I don’t want to write about love. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to feel the breeze on my skin and notice the click that means something’s shifting, and to allow a smile to smash me to pieces, and then watch those pieces drift and swirl and make a new shape. And that’s who I’ll be. And I won’t look for love, but I will let it find me. And when it finds me, I won’t resist. I won’t look back to make comparisons or hold up a stick against it to measure how long it might last; I won’t try to tame it with rituals or stifle it with romantic notions or think it into something that makes sense. I will sit in a room with a man, doing nothing of any importance, and I will lift up my gaze and I will see. What’s right in front of me.
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