I’ve come to realize that at 46, I have spent a lifetime chasing the idea of love. It’s an abstract concept that most have a hard time holding in their hand long enough to understand. The feeling, when it’s true, might have you huddled in the corner whispering “my precious.”

Love is something we want to keep, but can’t name or map or diagram out to know when it is true. Like many people, I have spent the aforementioned lifetime with a conglomerate definition of love that comes from society, movies, books, and learned environment.

The concept is often too heavy for a person to consider individually. This would mean each of us would have to stand before the mirror and not be ashamed of what looks back at us. What happens when all those areas I have gleaned a definition of love from are broken?

The last three years have been a journey to love myself. I have started this late in life, but with a good set of tools: experience, knowledge, friendship. The journey will continue as my years tack on, but right now, in the strangest of times, I have found my definition of love.

Any of It

Sometimes I want to write
a poem where our breath
meets as it dances over
our lips and tongue.

I’d forgotten
what it felt like
to be loved

to know the weight
of an arm across
my chest, 

the wet warmth
of velvet kisses, 
unexpected.

The way laughter pulls 
two souls together,
or the surprise of existence
the morning sun brings,

Or how a hand slides
into another, grounding
the world into reality,

the quiet closeness in awe
of a sunset, fingers tangled
in the soft waves of my hair.

These were all dreams I once had,
the sweet rambles of sleep
and rearranged heartbeats, 
soft delirium easily trapped 
in the dark minutes before midnight.