Nowadays, I hear the self-declaration everywhere.
Lover girl. Lover boy.
We speak so easily of loving hard, loving deeply, loving love itself. We know love well enough to recognize its presence in the body, yet there is nowhere to point and say, there it is. We observe what love produces. But I am less certain we understand where it begins.
Does love lie dormant within us, waiting for another person to reveal its magnitude? Or can someone, merely by being precisely who they are, make possible a love that did not exist before them?
Because we say my love so easily… and I wonder about the word my.
If another person awakens the love but does not create it, then the love must have belonged to us already. Yet if that particular love could never have existed without our encounter with them, I am not certain it belongs entirely to us either.
Hmm.
Which then makes me wonder whether “lover” is such a casual declaration after all.
Perhaps there are forms of love that can only come into existence through encounter. You could live eighty years and never know that particular love because the person whose existence might have made it possible never crossed your path.
Then I wonder… where, exactly, does such a love reside?
If it could not have existed without another, yet is felt within us, calling it ours suddenly seems inadequate.
Perhaps there are loves that belong fully to neither the lover nor the beloved.
And perhaps the question is not whether love was always there.
Maybe the question is whether we were.
I wrote this as a teenager. I suppose I’ve been wondering about love for a long time.
