For me, love was the gaze of a man
who followed me home when I turned him down, love
was the kiss I pressed to my grandmother as she lay dying in her hospital bed.
Love, I’d thought, was the
grip I had on my best friend’s hand the day we parted ways for good, and the bony arms
I wrapped around my brother, for him to shrug off like a too-warm coat.
Love is something I’ve asked about before.
And I’ve seen people who tell me
And that love is smiles and fingers twined together in bed when it’s cold outside,
it is history and in-jokes and fondness and need,
I have pressed my lips to another’s skin, searching, and thought
I have perched on swings pushed by someone else and on benches
meant for four but taken by two, I have
watched Disney’s Cinderella twenty-one times and each time after the second I have chorused
and thought, in content times, surely
surely this must be it. But that was a thought born of despair, not conviction, because
still I would wonder, darkly,
what is “this”, what am I missing and—for how long must I fake having it?
I have danced and I have sung and I have read,
and again and again I have asked and searched and still I have found
A fellow cynic once told me love is a cesspit, a festering
sewage of emotions from which, once you’ve fallen into, you may
you will never be clean of again. And I blinked at her, uncomprehending,
And it wasn’t a protest but it wasn’t an agreement. She laughed at me, patronizing over
what might’ve been befuddlement, might’ve been pity,
and if she answered my unspoken query she did it so quietly
over the silence of my own asking.
Love, another told me, is a lifestyle, a dedication to the one
you have to get up at three in the morning for because the baby’s crying
and sure you’ve only had five hours but they’ve
been asleep less than three; to the one
who’s hair you have to pull back, who’s sickbed you have made
a home. Love is a choice you make
day after day, to look that someone in the eye and say,
and decide that the flavor the words leave is truth. Yet when I spoke those same words,
tossed them through the unnaturalness that hung
between me and my friend-boy,
they did not taste of truth, and they did not taste of deceit, and I grew familiar instead
with the salt of desperation on my tongue.
My father likes to tell me, as we clear
the empty bottles from my mother’s TV throne together, that he loves
God. And in him that love is prayers and offerings is
the illusion of fervor unending—is a lesson he left to us, his children,
I have made my hollow prayers, sought my promises’ fulfillment, have cried and reached
out into that abyss, and yet,
not once did the abyss deign to reach back into me.
I have waited at that cliff where the world ends for so long, looking down in
an excess of resignation rather than a lack of fear, asked of the void,
And the nothing replied its existence. Nothing.
Then what, I once begged, now absently wonder, is love? That’s, god, that’s
such a terrible question to have to ask,
because love is nothing less –or more– than an idea, as long-lived as humanity, real
was an ink I once drank deeply of, bled all my stories with, but now
now my pen taps the bottom of that shallow well, barely sipping
at something I ran dry of long ago.
So fine. For loyalty, for safety, for comfort, for that fluxing foundation of familiarity,
for these things I have found that are not love, I can settle. I
And when it becomes my turn, and yet it is no longer me but my brother, and he
The answer bubbles up to my surface, too feeble to be froth, and just as unhelpful
as any answer I’ve ever gotten to that question:
blakekathryn
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
prguitarman
