Love Is A Word

I began searching for myself one day, during my middle school years, by tackling the concept of love. At the time, as anyone else at that age, I was full of teenage angst and insecurities. Without the social media outlets kids have today, I resorted to writing. What was one of my biggest, itchiest issues of the day back then?

Love.

That first, fall-into-the-abyss, heart-pounding crush everyone has the pleasure of experiencing. It’s a miserable and yet necessary step for anyone’s personal development because of the impression it leaves. It is one of the earliest times in someone’s life where they remember pitting themselves against their mental wall, trying to find out if they’re good enough.

Are you good enough for this other person, who has you rabidly scavenging through your emotions and thoughts?

That bittersweet first time a person tries to make sense of love.

I began writing to try and understand everything I was feeling. Words written are always easier to see than those floating in your mind. As obvious as that statement sounds, jotting thoughts down and physically holding them can have a powerful effect on people when they actually try it. There’s something curative about examining your written words down to the lettering and the spacing. There’s a voice in those written etches.

What started out for me as an escape in junior high turned into a refuge in high school. A piece of paper became the place where I could silently speak out loud. It was my portable panic room in those times of illogical, adolescent stress.

I wrote about love… what it was… what it became to me. In my quest to objectify love as something that I could hold and that I could study, I discovered poetry. Love began to mold my words and my way of creating them, all while I continuously tried to understand what love truly was. It wasn’t until love came crashing down on me in the form of heartbreak that I realized what my study had done. I had navigated this years-long squall of emotions to find at the end of it all this serenity of understanding myself just a little bit more than before. It gave me the means to pen my way through those stages of my young life and discover a piece of the person that I am today. My first post on here is to encourage more written words into your life, and to share with you my experience with the first topic that started it all for me. The word love.

Love is a word for you to try and understand. It’ll move you and break you. It’ll force you to leave it behind, to feel hate towards it, to one day rejoice and rekindle with again. Try writing, for the soul’s sake, when you find yourself trying to figure something out that isn’t meant to be a quick discovery. You’ll learn more about the process, and more about yourself, as you undertake such a challenge. Ten years down the road, I find myself still examining that powerful word while happily in love and married.

I’ll leave you with my first departure from love, in the form of a poem that I wrote in those younger days, ten quick years ago.

Love Was A Word

i met this girl named Love once.

i still remember the stare i had for her when my eyes met her person,
Something different,
Something i think i grasped but never owned.
That first day she widened my eyes and stole my breathe
As i simultaneously stole the number for her phone.
She smiled and poured concrete into my brain’s very soul,
And it stuck.
Love’s picture.

What she looked like is only for memory to know
But i swear that the concrete still cracks with the beats her heart throws.
Good holds
And my mind knows, still, the very notes to the songs we once wrote,
With the steps our feet roamed, during those late night, long walks
Through the beach and the city we called Home.
It still drips clearly from the core of my eardrums to the tips of my earlobes,
As if now when i visit the beach i weren’t alone.

Love.

She was young and restless,
With her scent, those lips, that necklace.
i vividly flipped behind my eyes as my sense of time loaded up and tried to end it.
Sitting in my car focused on the rev of the engine,
Focused on the dotted white lines that flashed at me,
Becoming alive like vivid white lies
That kept calling for me to drive on by.

i knew Love.

i met her with both my eyes.
i laughed in circles whenever both my hands held her
And we spun to see the lights circle and blind the sky.
We lost our balance and hit the road
Cracking concrete,
Breathing concrete,
My heart’s four cylinders still pumping at full speed
As the street lights switched off and we reached sunrise.

Blood and oil boiled to paint that morning backdrop.
Every word spoken,
Permanent letter for letter etched into the screen of my laptop,
Pouring from the stems twitching in the cement block
Found behind my head’s lock.
My head dropped for a second as i tried to stay awake,
Sitting at the red light where my car stopped,
Still waiting for a green but a yellow was as close as we got.

i met Love.

She literally read me through both of my hardcovers
And in return i bent her pages and made her spine old.
A few heated collisions never seemed to break Love’s hold,
But the day came around when i saw a new Love unfold,
And in reality, my eyes then stared at someone who made the air cold.

i stopped looking,
My eyes squinting away as her hair flickered
And she etched another line into my head’s stone.
My lungs froze
And the four cylinders started pumping zeros
As my fists cracked onto the dashboard.
She told me to forget her name and everything words stand for.
She made sure to keep that lyric on replay
After the tape swallowed what it had to record.

My hands slipping on the steering wheel as the red light finally let go.
Yellow means slow,
As i struggled to grip onto circular reality and commit that U turn.
And i made it.

i gave the old spirit some gas and saw all the greens burn brighter,
Listening to the broadcast of the constant spinning of my tires.

And i realized,

i dont know Love.

i never met her.

Love was just a word made up of four simple letters.