What is Love?

Yes, I have loved. I can only remember one circumstance where I truly thought I was "in love" with someone. And I did - and do - love him, just not in the way I'd expected. Turns out that I love a lot of people in ways I don't expect. And the person that I love now...well, I haven't yet figured out just exactly how I love him.

Because this is a public website, and pretty much the entire planet is connected to the internet, I am going to change this person's name from what it actually is to what it actually isn't. Let's call him "Richard."

How do you know when you love somebody? Is it just "feelings" - butterflies in the stomach, a quick, nervous smile - that indicate love? Is it altogether physical - a jolt down the spine, an intake of breath, an increase of salivation - that points to this elusive love? Is it habit - mowing the lawn, paying the bills, raising children - that defines love? In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, the husband asks his wife, "Do you love me?" She respond, exasperated, "Yes, I love you." He persists, "Do you love me?" To which she replies "After twenty-five years I've cleaned your house, cooked your food, washed your clothes!" "Yes," he sings, "but do you love me?" At the end of the song they realize that, despite their arranged marriage, they do love each other. The final line of the song is, "After twenty-five years, it's good to know." The question I ask is, does it take twenty-five years to know?

America. The land of fast-food, fast-lanes, and fast women. Or men. We want love and we want it now. We want sex and we want it now. We don't think past NOW. But after now passes, we want something else. After gut-reactions, we want stability...immediately. After passion we want commitment. Immediate commitment. I think the definition of love eliminates the possibility of "immediate love" or "love at first sight." However, does it take a lifetime to develop and recognize it?

I'm a cautious person. Oddly cautious. Almost hesitant. I played basketball in junior high, and I hated the moments preceding the short walk from the bench to the court. I would ask my coach at least three times what plays we were running, where I was supposed to be, who I was supposed to guard. I wanted it to be perfect when I stepped out there, in front of the small crowd. Relationships are the same way. I ask myself over and over, what is it you want? I don't commit to anyone - friends, more-than-friends - quickly or easily. When I'm immersed in a new setting, I take a while to observe, soak it in, until I'm ready to start reciprocating, to start participating, the way the people whom I am with are reciproacting and participating. Not that I'm not me when I'm with different people, but that I am not one person, not one predictable pattern of habit.

What does all this indicate? A lack of trust? Paranoia? Perfectionism? Narcissism? No. Patience. The patience to find out what people are about, to learn them, to read them, to know them before I react to them. It should come as no surprise that the one boyfriend I've had was halfway around the world for the three or so months that we were "dating." I broke up with him because I couldn't stand talking on the phone for an hour or two when I had things to do. Our lives were so completely different that I felt I couldn't even relate how my day went because he wouldn't "get it." I realized later that I did love him, but as family, as a respected and cherished brother-figure. I loved him as a friend, not as a man (and to those men of you who wince at that because you have been that guy that a girl, or girls, said to "let's be friends" or "I love you as a friend," I am truly sorry. Unfortunately for women, that realization often comes too late). That has been the case for many of the men I had believed myself to love. However, there is someone that has plagued my thoughts for six months, who once brightened my dreary and stress-filled days with wry humour and an insatiable grin. I've seen him twice in the past three months. And yet, when time should have moved me on, when my pattern of behavior usually let me forget my crushes the very day they stepped out of my life, or I decided to stop liking them, he is annoyingly still in my head.

So let's call him Richard.

I'm a poet. It is arguable whether I am any good at writing poetry, but I nevetheless consider myself to be one, so it is natural for me to want to describe him, and the effects he had upon me, in fragmented thoughts and ethereal images, because while the memory of him is beautiful and warming, it also haunts me. Taunts me would be a better word. It all seems so..."unfair" would be too strong a word. Even "intolerable" is not quite right, because apparently I am tolerating it, if unhappily. It just seems sort of wrong. Wrong that he isn't in my life anymore - not even as a "love interest," but simply as a friend. The taunting part is the ironic part: I pass by where he lives every day on my way to work. In fact, he basically lives across the street from me. And I never see him. "Just go knock on his door!" you say. "Give him a call!" Ah, my dear friend, if it were only so simple. Or, if I would only let it be so simple. It is not, however, anywhere near simple.

Why, indeed? It's funny that I'm writing about this at all, seeing as I have staunchly declared since the age of fourteen that I am never getting married and never having children (at the time it was a violent reaction to my parents' divorce - I figured if people who were married 27 years can't figure out what love is, I have - as the phrase goes - an ice-cube's chance in hell of figuring it out; it has since evolved into a more refined and quiet reasoning, but I will not venture there right now). And yet, if you love someone, what can you do? Sometimes it sneaks up on you, crawls up over the back of your shoulder and whispers so quietly to you that you think it must be a song playing in the background, but which, slowly, over time, becomes a promise, a promise that you have been tricked into longing for, a promise that must be fulfilled, that cannot be denied. Love is such a bitch.

It seems that six months ago love sat on my shoulder, and started humming. Now I've got the full orchestra playing in my ear.

I'm not sure you can ever give a simple answer to the question, "Why do you love him (or her)?" If you could give a simple answer, then it would infer that love is simple, and if love were simple, everyone would get it, and if everyone got it, then the United States wouldn't have a freaking 50% divorce rate, there would be no fatherless children, no prostitution, no pornography, and no romance novels. If love were simple, the world would cease to have problems of any kind, because if one understood love, one would not turn away from it.

Unfortunately, love isn't simple.

I don't love Richard (however I do "love" him) for a definable reason. Rather, it is a collection of impressions, the accumulation of laughter so vast that it comes seeping out from my stuffed-full ribcage closets, spilling out onto the floor of my heart, and taking up the hallways of my lungs so that I can no longer breathe, so that I no longer want to.

He says something outrageous, and I say something embarassed or outraged in return, and it invariably makes him laugh, and the skin around his eyes folds and bunches and his mouth opens wide and his head tilts back and he just laughs, and he's happy, and I'm happy that he's happy, so I smile, and I think he likes my smile; I've been told by many strangers that I have a beautiful smile, so he, a friend, should think something similiar, I hope. Often I make him laugh so hard that he stops what he's doing and puts his hands on his hips as the laughter rocks his entire torso back, lolling forward again as he turns to regard me with eyes so ever-intense that I feel absolutely naked, and not completely ashamed of it. He would always look right into my eyes when he spoke to me. Invariably, it was I who looked away, who couldn't stand the intimate connection of looking into the sight of another looking back.

He was calm, collected, who had what I can describe as nothing other than a lazy grace, calling to mind the image a lounging panther; apparently harmless, when in reality it's simply waiting, unperturbed, for its next meal. Not to suggest that he was a "womanizer," moving from one girl to the next with speed. On the contrary, the opposite was what disconcerted me: he had a girlfriend, and he appeared to be fairly content with remaining her boyfriend. At the same time, without ever hinting that he would like something more between us - to do so would have been unthinkable - it felt like he knew something, or felt something, different, around me, or about me, I don't know which, or if it was either. It was not something I recognized in him until it was too late. Although I am forced to wonder if I had realized it "in time," would there have been anything I could have done about it? Or would it have simply made me miserable earlier? I couldn't "have" him then, and I can't have him now.

Still...I remember. I remember watching him work (for we were coworkers, and it is through our mutual employment that I had the continual opportunity to observe, interact, and admire him), noting how incredibly effortless he made everything seem. As if he knew how to do everything, and was simply waiting for the rest of us to catch up with resigned, but limitless, patience. And while I loved his mischievous grin, or his outright barks of laughter, it was often the slow, lazy smile that made my ears burn and my eyes widen. They say that love makes your blood quicken, your breath to stop. That may be true. But I think the true mark of love is the violent contraction of the iris, reducing the pupil to the size of astonishment, reducing light intake because suddenly everything is too bright, suddenly everything is all too clear. Love can literally open one's eyes.

There was a few times when I had an effect on the constriction of his irises. When I said something that made him unfold his perpetually-crossed-across-the-chest arms, take a half-step back, open his lips in an astonished half-smile, and shrink his eyes as they opened wide, quite literally moved by the words I had spoken.

His grin is a thing I adore. But his eyes are something I cherish, something that pierced me with vulnerability - my own, and eventually his - and intensity, intensity of connection while standing three, four, eight feet away, never touching, but somehow being touched. I first fell in love with his eyes, the way I felt not criticized by his gaze, but validated, affirmed. You are worth talking to, he would say with those eyes. I want to talk to you. I want...

A few moments of tentative contemplation, of wondering could I love him? resulted in two poems, one that featured an event that happened conerning him teaching me the correct way to slice an onion coupled with things he had already taught me about making chocolate desserts, and the other summarizing and poeticizing a conversation we had about our differing views on sex and relationships. They are as follows:

I want to make you chocolate

dark cocoa-dusted truffles, no grain, a smooth illumination on your tongue.

You smile.

God, I love that grin.

What about a framboise torte, dripping raspberries; gushing

in their own exuberance?

You stand behind me.

You place yourself behind me.

A cappuccino cream cake?  Push your teeth through 

the barely-there filling?

You rest your left hand on mine, on the counter

on the cutting board.

A chestnut cream roll? I ask, heart beating more than it should.

Sliced thin to appreciate the intensity.

Chocolate profiterole?  I have to whisk constantly to remove all the lumps

from my throat,

I have to thrash my heart back into place,

mix constantly.

Black-and-white paves?  They say you have to be patient

and wait for the exact right moment before you pour

(your heart out) the layers of chocolate.

You lay your right hand on mine, slowly moving each of my fingers to the correct position

on the knife

standing so close I'm aware of your white coat against my apron.

L'étoile?  

You push down on my hand against the fruit, slicing through skins

and juices

cradling my small frame with yours.

Bûches de Noël.  Swollen with mousse, buttercream...

You tell me to lean back until my spine touches your hand

then you turn my shoulders gently until the angles are all right

and replace your hands on mine 

to remind me the reason you're standing behind me.

I wish I could look at you, but I'm afraid of what I'd see.

No.  I'm frightened of losing what might be there.

I'm terrified that what I want isn't there.

So I can't look, I just stare at your hands enclosing mine.

Hot chocolate?

How about hot chocolate?

Yeah...

let's start with that.

It's chilly but I'm slightly damp from work, the perspiration

cooling on my skin, my pores closing once again, trapping

the smell of mozzarella and goomba sauce in my epidermis.

I'm standing in the dark, car key pressed to my lower lip

indenting the soft tissue, teasing without realization, the man across from me.

Car door open, as three times before, seatbelt connected from the chair

to the door.

He says "You're one of those wait-until-you're-married types, aren'tcha?"

And I say "Yeah, but not just because I should, but because

sex is a physical expression of an emotion,

an emotion I haven't felt, and don't know if I ever will."

And he barks a laugh, a grin, and says "That's jaded."

I shrug and say "It's true."

He looks at me now and says "But it's jaded."

I look back and say "So?"

And he's frustrated now that I can't understand:

          "You gotta find that someone who makes you numb, or burn, or whatever,"

and I say "Why?  To what end?"

And he shakes his hands and says "Because.  It's just..." 

and shakes his head and turns to look away,

over my shoulder, at the street and the condos behind us,

and he doesn't have an answer, but he does, because there's a reason,

I know there's a reason, but it's not enough.

            We talk and talk about childhoods and abuse and broken b

r      o

                                                                        k

                        e          

                                                                                                            n

things, and he laughs that laugh that's almost-but-never-quite a sob,

and says "I just wished someone would fucking hug me,"

and I make a motion as if to say "Do you want a hug now?"

and I would have given him one but he says

            "But you don't like to be touched."

And I say "Oh, yeah..."

            and step away.

A pause.  A breath.  We breathe

air pluming in the night, between us and never touching.

            "People expect things when they touch you," I say.

"My mom wants affection.  My sister wants control.  My dad wants to keep me a six-year-old.

            People want things when they touch you.  That's why I don't want to be touched."

And my unspoken statement is " ...but you don't want anything.  You can touch me.  You don't want anything."

            But he won't.  

Which is fine.  It is actually okay.

Words, again, a hand-pound (made clumsy by my inexperience and completely numb and small hand),

            and "Goodnight."

            "'Night."

I step in my car, close the door, 

push down the latch, breathe on my palms,

listen to my heart tinkle down in sharp little pieces down through my lungs, 

and drive off.

...so, I love him. I don't know what the hell that means - after all this I don't know what it means - but I do know that, somehow, I love him. And it hurts, it continually physically aches that I am not in his company anymore, that I cannot see his eyes with mine, that I can't hear his voice, or even read his words. He has, in effect, been cut off, but the wound that's left has not been cauterized, it bleeds freely, profusely, and, so far, eternally, neither dwindling nor ceasing its flow of constant, constant sadness.

I miss him. I miss him more than I should, more than my pattern of habit allows for. I should forget him. But I can't.

Maybe that's what defines love: feeling less than what you were when they are gone. And yet...you hang on to that bitter, tragic hope.

Maybe that is love.