intertwined, sewn together

love, what it means to me, and the many ways it holds me

i know what love is, even if it's in a vague, abstract sense, but i often have trouble parsing what it isn't. sometimes i wonder - is love just that, a feeling, existing in a vacuum unencumbered by everything else, by which i mean humans and the things they do, especially to each other. or does love encompass everything - when you love someone does everything you do and say fall under that? when you bring the word love between two people does everything that happens between them and within them taint love for better or for worse?

i know bell hooks says that love and abuse can ever coexist and i don't know if i agree, but then it fundamentally comes down to which definition of love you believe in, what you think love is (e.g. for hooks love entails the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth). obviously, not everyone has a delineated definition, but an idea, perhaps. if your values and standards tell you love and abuse cannot coexist, then of course it can't, it shouldn't for you. love is an action, that’s what everyone’s been saying lately (or for a while now). you have to choose to do it every single day, the intentionality of it, the effort, etc etc. i feel like when i was younger, this was not what i had been taught - or not taught, more like absorbed. what i’d consumed from books and movies and the internet in general about love was that it was this otherworldly, all-consuming, overwhelmingly and frighteningly passionate feeling, FEELING, capitalized and italicized. i believed this very exact thing up until i met the person i am with now, who i love and love and love, every single day.

what is love to me? a feeling of tenderness as i’m folding his clothes when he’s away. imagining him in them, missing him. the feeling that both of us exist deep inside the other because we know each other to the bone, even different versions of ourselves inside us - like matryoshka dolls, one inside another inside another inside another, endlessly. it’s friendship and laughter and inside jokes, it’s a sacred, secret language just between the two of us; it’s wanting to be better for them, because you’ve been lonely your whole life and what you thought love was all along turned out to be smoke and mirrors and an illusion, and thank god it was because the love i have now is better and more real than all the daydreams i used to conjure up in my head when i was younger.

and the bad days, the disagreements, the disappointments - just as real, just as natural, a part of it all as they should be. i don’t know if two humans can coexist without any friction at all, it's how you meet it that matters. we never “fight” so to speak - no raised voices, no profanities thrown at each other, nothing hurtful, never, never; discomfort, unease, tension, sure. but i could never imagine saying something that could hurt him deliberately. genuinely, never – and it’s the same for him. before we even started dating, i wrote in my journal “...we’re so so kind to each other, too much, almost” and reading that back i knew the love begun to unfold from the very moment we became friends. the tenderness and sweetness of that, of being too kind, can you imagine. sometimes even i can’t. but i think most of all a love like this makes me want to be better, fix my shortcomings because god knows they’re abundant. a love that makes you realize how cherished yet how incredibly imperfect you are. it’s all too glaring especially if you’ve never been in a long-term, healthy relationship before (fleeting and ill-fated situationships, sure, but they’re hardly the best foundation for self-growth or understanding what love should be). it can be and is so, so uncomfortable to know that another person knows you in your entirety. it’s the ‘if we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known’ of it all - overused and cliche at this point, but it’s the truest thing i know.

villain and violent,
infant and innocent
baby, both arms cradle you now
both arms cradle you now
- forwards beckon rebound, adrianne lenker

in my previous post, i talked about not writing or journaling all that much anymore because most of my writing would stem from a place of lack, and once it was filled i felt a release from the incessant and feverish quality that my writing was imbued with. the heavy, aching, disturbing longing for love. i think most of all, barring every connotation of love, i would yearn for someone not just to know me, but to know every mundane and inconsequential detail about my days, someone i could spend those mundane and inconsequential days with; someone that makes companionship feel as good as solitude used to feel to me, someone that gets me through and through and through and sees good in me and chooses me despite the rot underneath, despite how unlovable i used to think i was, the mold by that point festered so deeply that it had gone septic. or so it seemed. the drama of it all. all it takes is someone to see through it all, say yes you still need some growing up to do but i’ll grow with you and i will love you like i’ve never loved anything or anyone else before. 

like james joyce once wrote in a letter, no human has ever stood so close to my soul as you stand.

some songs, on love: