I think I have spent most of my life falling in love with feelings.
My first relationship was with a boy who made me feel normal, a boy who snuck me library books beneath the plastic-wooden desks of a dull painted classroom. When he whispered to me fragments of stories in alcoves of knotted blue and dirty wooden chairs, I thought “this must be what love is like”, because what else could it be?
When I was nineteen, a girl kissed me at center-stage, in the fleeting moments between the close of the curtain and the heady rush off-stage. When she pulled away, the air between us was thick with excitement and exhilaration of a performance well done, and for a moment I was flying, unmoored and unbothered, wondering, “is this what love is?”
I am not much older now than I was back then, but somehow, I cannot help but think that there must be something more to all of this. Do I love because of the way I feel? Or do I feel because I love?
In the end, does it even matter? We love, because we love, because we love. We run around in circles to escape our emotions, to run towards them, but they come for us in their own time all the same. I suspect we are incapable of anything less than what it is that love entails, simply because we are. So in the end, is it only love that matters?
