Love is love is love is love. Four times uttered for four times truth, love is what it wishes to be, who are we to say the shape it should hold?
I’ve seen love adopt so many forms in my days on this planet, seen it stretch to swallow those in its proximity, absorbing them like some gelatinous thing, morphing around them and covering all the bits left exposed so long. I have seen it focus with laser and pin-point precision, lock in like a missile, heat-seeking and relentless, I have seen it wax and wane and grow and ebb like a celestial body, orbiting around and around and changing its distance over the course of a month, a year, a lifetime.
Few things shapeshift like love, few things know the way to such variation.
Some love with singular aim, gift it to another and bestow it over and again in loyal fashion, they want for not outside the soul they give it to, find a hole in their heart that matches their silhouette with such exactity no other explanation exists save they were stolen from them. Some wait for this love when it’s slow to surface, hands on still waters as though their palms could listen, their fingers could hear. Someday, they tell themselves, someday the bubbles will rise, they will dance over the peacocked whorls in their fingerprints, they will follow them and find my hand waiting. Someday.
Some love like philanthropy, like they’ve too much to spend and so spread it. Some give it, and feel more rich the more they blanket in their adoration. Some with hearts born with more chambers than the rest, more holes in the shape of more souls, and so love many at once. Some look at these and throw questions like darts at the cork board of their decisions, ask themselves why one is not enough, attempt the maths un-calculatable and unique to only them.
Some forget here, that love can be so many different things, that there is no wrong way to love.
I am lucky to love in many ways, and I have felt its architecture change like a building that knows to shift when I need it to. Here, says it, a room of some requirement, all you need is beyond its door, here, says it, a private suite for two. Now, and this will be no surprise, I love one with a ferocious clarity I’ve not ever experienced before, a devotion that flirts with the borders of worship, and I feel no shame for this. But, but says love in a voice of ten thousand accents, I am here in other ways, I wear other faces.
I love loyally, and I spread that love like acorns of oak, like wildflower seeds over the soil of many. Once planted, I will grow that love no matter the fires that come to the surfaces of what we make together. I love those that flood me, those that cut down my trees and sell them as lumber, I love those that walk softly through my canopies, those that throw chainsaw noise into the quietest corners. I love, though it comes with a caveat, and always has. I will not love in a way that lies, I will not tell you all you wish to hear, I will speak truth in loving voice, but sometimes that truth will sting. I will not abide a settling, says this love I love, this natural way I call the only way.
I’ve friends that love more than one, this philanthropic style I spoke of earlier, they devote to one, but their love seeps out and stains the skin of others, they love proudly, these few I know. They speak of love like their lives are not meant for singularity, they say love is more, and they would be less should they restrict it. They know the taste of multiple lips, the softness of many skins. I love the way they love, they who worry not of convention or the whispers of others. I do not love this way, not this time in this body, but I see it as beautiful, too.
Life teaches you lessons, if you listen close enough. It shows you things if you bother to hear. Not all love will look like your love, not all lives will follow your pattern. We are here to love, to let others love in the ways they know how. Love is a borderless place, a map drawn in pencil, dotted lines at the peripheries of all manifestations. Here is where it passes through, like liquid, like fog between the branches of quiet forests.
Look not for a pattern, not here, not in love, for one does not exists. Love is the skin of some octopus, a thousand thousand receptors that know how to change, to reflect back the light it finds itself in, how to hide in plain site, camouflaged with all the rest.
Love, this shapeshifting thing, this creature of a million colors.
There is no wrong way.
A borderless place,
love, a patternless creature,
a shapeshifting thing.
There's No Wrong Way To Love | 2.18.24