There are so many ways to love and only one way to need it

We are defined by how we touch the other

You and a lousy lover. You and a friend gone cold. You and your changing mother. You with a heavy heart. Spend a lifetime trying to understand it, twist it like a magic 8 ball with your body stretched over the billiard table hoping for a different answer. It’s always been so needed but so painful. You never learn, which is a good thing.

When I was younger, I thought it was my parents letting me stay home from school on snow days. I’d replay cartoons and have endless snack plates at my disposal, eternity is just pajamas and a warm sofa. Later on, a note passed under the classroom table meant just for me. Boys took their pleasure in confusion, going from mean to overly kind, but never neutral. I found it in the chaos and the tension, some relief. Savored it as much as one can, and thought I’d finally deciphered what aliveness means. A few years down the road, all grown up and newly noble, picking my brother up in the early afternoon, him turning seven and myself seventeen, he held my hand so tight and told me all about his first day at school. He was so hopeful then and I was salient to him, my heart swelled into something fluently beaming that transcended time and space. This has to be the best day of my life, I thought, I will remember this until my hands go numb and wrinkly. That was love. Of course it was. So affluent and present, demanding nothing back.

Other times, I’d blur into it, dissolving at the self. Forever altruistic, just not fully there. It’s always airports where things come to the surface – altars of mundane truth. I caught it then, again, this time siloed between departures 1 and 2, trying to pick you out in the crowd. My heart was beating through the picket sign because, well, again, this feeling of doing something you know wouldn’t be done for you if it came down to the reverse. Palpitations of he, she, cyclical nature. I was a nuisance in the bright life of it all, or a silent savior giving out placebo pills to ease the pain of whatever. The beautiful part is that I needed nothing back, not at the time. You can’t be mad at your own insignificance, but you can drink it away. Every ounce of love given was theirs to keep. It was fine then. I was fulfilling some higher mission – but who signed off on it, and who’s to file for refunds now? We all want to die for something, we’ll take the first opportunity to do so.

And then, what comes up on the other side is naturally rotten at the root. Being treated bad makes you bad, it’s only the laws of physics. Contaminated, I’d go on to be ruthless. Selfishly biting off the juiciest part, spitting out what I dislike, disappearing in the midst of it, becoming greater than the worst day, sending a nasty text and tossing hearts around like they belong to no one but myself. I’d gotten filthy and prudent with it. What happens outside my own skin was not a concern of mine, and if there was a right way to live that surely wasn’t one and I knew it, but bandaids drag skin with them if you rip them off too fast. I had to do three steps back to understand the damage wasn’t fun.

Now, it hits me on a random Sunday that I am a lover; a diligent one at that. Not bitter, not dwelling on the past, devoted to my present. My love is not an extension of my body; my body is the extension of my love. We are defined by how we touch the other. It’s communal, platonic, romantic, sisterly, sterile, naive, it’s everything and nothing. It’s in the neck breathing, in the public claiming, in the quiet help, the sibling shittalk, in the heart-shaped cake – it feels good, feels right, we do it well because it is the one thing we’re naturally good at. I crash, you lift me up, make time for me, I offer help, we pick up the slack, apologies when things go sideways, you hold my hand, he assembles records, she disappears, they don’t respond, protective of you, gentle with myself, we patch it up and it goes on and on and on. Sometimes it ends, intimacy turns to formerly acquainted. Sometimes it stays forever. The trick is in not counting time. We ruin it when we demand gravity punch above its weight or ask too many questions. I’ve stopped asking what’s in it for me when every cell in my body knows how to do it. Molecularly ingrained.

Assembling love like seashells on the shore, I think of it in flashes. Little moments of tenderness, of reciprocation, of service, of apathy, of my cruelty, all branching out and blooming. How does one live when everything is ocean? When we’re so vast, explorable, enticing on our own? Never good people, never bad either, no killer and no prey. I loved it all, leaving and being left, in every ripple there was something to swim under. Love dangerously, love softly, easy and hard, love safely, love for something, love against it, love after being proven wrong. There is no closing of this chapter, there was no wrong way for us to do it, to undo it. To grasp a feeling, let it run its course, knowing some things are better off not being theorized about, just lived through. If I was made for the other, I plan on making the best out of my time. Let’s always be loving, so loving that the earth takes on a heart-shaped axis, rotating towards the magical. Yeah, let’s do that. And so much more.

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