Love is not something I know how to write about. Devotion, yes, in all its dedication and emotion, sadness and fear; anger, hurt, and obsession bleeding into me through my heart and pouring out of my fingers, but I do not write about love.
Love, to me, is more than just a beautiful little word; it’s an earworm, making its way to the front of my mind, a TikTok audio declaring it so. It’s the beauty in watching as my friends smile, laugh, and love, and it’s wonderful and it’s heartbreaking when reality sets in.
“I love you” is a foreign phrase to me, practiced only in mind, silent spaces; I could count on one hand the times I could have said it with confidence but didn’t, for I’ve only ever loved from afar; past relationships either unfulfilled or long-distance, gone too soon or leaving scars that never healed. I have never loved like this before.
I joke, draw my eyes to others, throw myself to the touch of anyone, anyone who will truly care, anything for the semblance of a normal relationship instead of the realization that I am one of the only ones without.
I wept for the first time in months last week. I felt as the anger rose within me and I fell to my knees; courtyards, statues, Diana gazing down upon me. I would’ve hopped on the bus right then and there, nothing but a half-charged phone and a dream, four hours to Chicago, the train to your neighborhood, just for the chance to sleep on your floor and feel your presence wash away everything I fear in this world.
As I cried, fists ripping grass to shreds, I realized that love isn’t just the sappy adoration that I see around me, the giddy puppy love of new beginnings or the gentle, lasting love that has been around for years. Not just grand romance or a platonic adoration, but a home you find in between.
It’s a guiding presence, something that drew us together once, then twice, and now once more. I find my home in the space between friendship and romance, a space where you may not find me, for now or ever again.
I built a self within an exoskeleton forged by years of pain, never eroded—no one ever got close enough. And so I continued my seven years of blocking out the reality that if I couldn’t let myself love as I truly longed to, how could I write about it? And how could I ever admit it to myself and to others?