When I Fell In Love

and I couldn't remember what love was.

"Kiss me until I forget how terrified I am of everything wrong with my life."
― Beau Taplin

That could have been the tagline for the next chapter in my life.

I spiraled, and I spiraled hard. While sexuality and the acts accompanied with it might have been enjoyable past times for peers my age, they became my biggest arsenal.

They were my toughest shields that kept me from dealing with anything that was too real - my family, my friends, my emotions, my mental health. They were the biggest guns I had to ensure that getting too close was never an option for those whose company I used and abused. They were only allowed as close as I deemed necessary for my own sanity.

This was the only semblance of control I had in my life. And, for a long time, these moments were what I constituted as love.

When I went to my first party before my senior year in high school, I fibbed to my overprotective father that it would just be another night at my best friend's house, but it wasn't. Two turned to three turned to thirteen turned to thirty before we could figure out who was who and where the liquor had come from.

One of those thirty became another heart to add to my jar as we made googly eyes at each other from across the table, lit sparklers in the dead of the night, knocked back one too many, and stole each other's breaths from one another's lips on the sofa from midnight to dawn. In the early hours of the morning, before he had to sneak back through his bedroom window, I still remember his face as he whispered a name in my ear that I can't quite recall and added a number to my phone that I hit ignore on far too many times for the rest of that summer.

I called that love.

When college came around and I started my first job, a coworker with colorful braids and skin that made my own look pale in comparison caught my eye and my heart and the lust I thought I had buried. She saw it though, as hidden as it was, in the calculated brushes of skin and embraces that were a tad too long and mischievous winks on the way to the backroom.

On nights after long shifts of dealing with angry mom's and deal hungry tourists during the holiday season, we'd drive down the busy city streets with the windows low and our spirits high. She'd occasionally lean over from the passenger seat to press her joint to my lips, catching my eye and holding it until honks and mayhem of the city's nightlife sounded around us.

When her last day arrived, we repeated our ritual, reaching her place in a hazy high unlike one we had ever felt before. Unsure of who leaned in first, who touched who first, all at once we were touching and kissing and sighing promises of dates that, even in my fogged up mind, I knew would never come. I still don't remember getting home that night, but I can clearly recall the gut wrenching sobs that silently left me that night in bed.

I called that love.

I discovered dating apps somewhere in my sophomore year and had countless encounters of date night movies with blowjobs for dessert in beat up cars in dark parking lots with guys I couldn't name, even at the time. Then, one came around who, though he didn't reject my desserts - because what man really would - he still stuck around for down time. He insisted on returning the favors. He didn't push me out the second we were done. He tucked my hair behind my ear and me under his arm and asked questions only people who wanted to care asked. He asked me questions I hadn't been asked in a long time. He called for a second date - and a third and fourth one too. He scared me. So, as a coward does, I tucked my tail and did what I had learned to do best - be quiet and confused and ruin both of our hearts.

I called that love.

I'm still not positive at where this definition of love manifested itself within me. Of course, all of my hit and miss attempts previously had done quite the number, but it could have been more.

It could have been the degradation of the relationship of my parents right before my eyes as she fell in love with a woman and he fell in love with loneliness and depression. It could have been the love between my sister and her husband, the only brother I'd ever known, that ended when she found comfort elsewhere and he proved she was his one and only by giving up the single life he had to offer. It could have been the ups and the downs between my grandparents, where the ups outweighed the downs, but the downs left images of him in the streets, clothes strewn through the yard, mind muddled with liquor and coke and heroin etched in my brain.

All I know is this love has unfortunately become a default of mine, one I have to fight against, but, more often than not, find myself falling back into.