Love is a beautiful gift everyone has the opportunity to own. It comes in different packages for each person; a golden rose, a letter, an empty cardboard box— a russian doll for those lucky enough to feel it more than once.
A complex form of appreciation, like counting every vein in a flower petal to make sure each one only has as many as your favorite number. Two green leaves, never three— just like the movies. A vibrant yellow to match her pale blonde hair, the perfect shade to bring out the red in her cheeks enough to see a permanent blush, not too dark or it will fall back in fear and stay hidden beneath her freckles like lilypads. Love is detail, and again, the most complex thing the human mind can handle. Perhaps thats why we hold it so dearly. So dearly, in fact, that we often forget what it is.
Lost in daily affairs, in a hello, in a smile; love is what we do when we forget to think. Love is all of the little things we continue to do in hopes to find happiness, and we search for so long that we often forget we do it at all.
That is exactly the reasoning for our misunderstanding of both love and happiness, they are equals. Loving someone or something is the act of bringing joy to one another with simple existence. Its a cell deep reaction to someones beauty, since love is swayed by happiness. The attraction attracts attraction, and you love to love the thing in question.
So tell me, with this definition in mind, lengthy as it is, what makes love specific to romance? What about the phrase "being in love" entails the messy details coming with bodies and minds? Is loving only endearing tolerance with the absence of romance or sex? To me, it is all the same plane of truth, love is a symbol of the joy someone brings to my life, in whatever package they chose to bring that day. If one day all they could find was an old, smelly shoe box and duct tape, it would be enough for me to know they remembered to bring love at all.
I look up from my journal to stare at the boy sitting on my bed. He's lounged back on his elbow and watching a bright screen that brings his completion out of the early evening light. Headphones that would otherwise block out my presence hang halfway off his ear, an extended hand. An absentminded example of love, right before my eyes; it makes me smile.
my eyes wander to the mirror behind me, black and blue bags hang from my colorless eyes, my pale skin bringing out the orange in my hair. I push it to the side, out of my tired eyes, and try to smudge the dark paint from underneath them, to no avail.
Sometimes I wish my mind was blank enough to allow me to love myself the way he does. Maybe if I drill my definition deep enough into my skull I will be able to teach myself how to love on command, teach myself to control the most feral emotion; so wild it almost makes an entity out of itself; a grin, an arm graze, the raised pitch of a gentle voice. It takes up so much space that it spills into every one of us every single day, but if I tell myself it fits in the palm of my hand, maybe it will one day.
He looks up from the screen and his color-filled face meets my pale gaze. The lights are dimmed so low that the candle light at my desk is brighter.
"How's the project, man?" he nonchalantly asks, noticing my stare in the mirror rather than into my book.
I breathe in deeply, turning back to the pages I had poured my soul into and took a moment to think.
"It's alright. Could be better. Could most definitely be better. I didn't think that it would be this hard, I've literally had dreams of having an assignment this, like, free. Theres so much creative freedom that its almost trapping me." I look back up to see his eyes focused on me. He gives me a weird look, so I smile, "what? It's a thing! Theres literally no instructions besides 'write about what you love', it sounds like the perfect prompt, but it genuinely has me stuck." I turn back to my work.
