“The Meaning of Love”

What does it mean to be in love?

Not to love someone, but to be in love.

To be madly, intoxicatingly, ridiculously in bleeding, bleeding love.

Love is slow, like being bathed in the orange light of the sunrise. You don’t know what the light
of day brings, but the luminescence covers you, sinking into every pore.

Love is a flower in the desert.

Love is The Scientist by Coldplay.

Love is consistent and incandescent devotion.

Love is the way my body fits into his hands like a puzzle piece.

Love is an age-old rhyme, woven into the tapestry of the human soul.

But love can be calamitous.

I find loneliness and languish in his strong arms,

That could just as easily break me as protect me.

I find myself sick with woe and anguish, forsaken by the man I love,

Cursed to bear the burden of a heart heavy as lead,

For it was never a fairytale, but a tragedy.

A tragedy incomparable with that of the greats,

Because Romeo would never be so cruel to his Juliet.

And oh, so suddenly, love becomes heartbreak.

Heartbreak is losing him.

Heartbreak is a montage of memories.

Heartbreak is the melancholic thrum of guitar strings.

Heartbreak is … realising that a father must be a man not a boy.

Heartbreak is building a home in my womb, only for it to become empty and quiet.

A small heart started beating, fluttering, on Christmas morning.

Even if it stopped the next.

A flickering pinprick like a tiny firefly.

So small, so fleeting, it almost wasn’t there.

But it was.

Love is that little heartbeat giving me the strength to run.

Love is never looking back, even if you stumble, and weep, and fall into the gravel and the mud
and the misery.

… And love is the war cry of a hundred heartbroken women,

Passionate and despairing and crestfallen and wrathful, but never broken, never vanquished,
never truly silenced,

For the love of a woman burns bright, putting every star in the sky to shame,

Consuming the man she adores,

Until there is nothing,

And she can finally breathe.