What I Think About When I Think About Love

Let’s try this again…

Sometimes, at 3 am, I can’t help but wonder how I can know what love is, what love means, what it means to love and be loved… because the first act of “love” that I ever knew was to be placed at the side of a road, outside tall black iron gates and brick walls, never (?) to see my family again.

How can I trust that people will say what they mean, that they will do what they say, that their definition of love is the same as mine?  I wonder if we are calling different things by the same name, if “love” suddenly means “dirt” and “lily” suddenly means “ocean” and oh yes, ocean, that’s what will separate us, because I never want to see you again… because I love you, don’t you get it?

How can I look people in the eye when I am used to seeing their backs?  And yet, what choice do I have?

Flash forward a few decades — just a few, not too many.

Love is written in letters (boxes of them) sent just to me; love is written in framed flowing script on my bedroom wall; love is written in the beautiful monotony of this daily life.  But this push-clinging took root in me long before I developed words, and so sometimes I forget how to read the language of love.  It’s that same old story:  I push away before I can be pushed away.   I cling with the fear of death at being (left) alone, because who knows, that palmar reflex might be the only thing between me and the jungle floor.  And the rapid-cycling of it all wreaks havoc on my spirit and all I want to do is get off this crazy train but the switch is stuck stuck stuck and it sucks sucks sucks.

Being adopted did not make me this fucked up.

But being abandoned did.

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It is a patient soul who waits for me while I  “work this shit out”.  Who understands that understanding isn’t always possible but keeps trying anyway, who “stands under” me (and around me and beside me) even when I try to stand alone.  Who will not let me be that island-dweller.  Who knows a different kind of love than that first kind I learned, that first kind that left me clinging to nothing but dirt because I had already fallen from the trees.

Why are we so surprised when we see ripples after throwing a sharp rock into a smooth pond?  Why are we shocked at the repercussions that take decades to get sorted out, if they ever completely do?  Why do we teach young children that loving = leaving, and then cluck our tongues at their dysfunction (never, of course, questioning the system that created it) when as adults, they embrace their partners with one arm and push them away with the other?  We are such geniuses, each and every blessed one of us.

The pond remembers the stone that shattered its glassy surface, a stone whose sharp edges still burrow deep into the sediment, seeking the core.

The earth remembers the scars that were left upon her.

I remember.

Still, at 3 am, my grasping palm finds the warm flesh of fingers that clutch instead of release, that help me shoulder my burdens rather than sentencing me to more.

And for a single fleeting moment, I think I might understand something about love.