i have never been in love

When they mistakenly choose a thing over you, the quivering of your heart, a ferocious trembling in the crisp dryness of winter. The moment of temptation, a trackless tunnel into their eyes, reflecting a mirror of desire & conflict. That temptation is not towards you.

When they decide that customs & practices should be formally, abruptly severed. Unworried: you know love does not have ears to hear nor eyes to see the bureaucratic dissolvement. The air resting, sitting, swinging its legs from your shoulders, gained weight while your consciousness was distracted with menial tasks. This weight you will never lose.

When they leave the door locked. The key is not in the same hiding place. You want nothing more than to be inside, but their presence, the frail dissolution of comfort that comes with distance, beats a splintering bat on your aching heart.

When they devote their physical being to another body. Knives plunge into your stomach but Ego drags its wet, cool paintbrush over your scorching wounds — uniqueness, golden and glimmering; but memory, my friend, memory erodes over time.

When they burst through Being with the magnificence of a lion penetrating the inner circumference of a circus hoop, their last diaphragm-maneuvered handful of carbon dioxide unwillingly relinquished from their lungs. Their consciousness is no longer of, in, and by this Space as yours is, dear one. The ravenous vultures of pain are circling circling circling circling; you cannot tell your mind that. And yet, like a parent standing up for their child in the wrong, you (brave courageous naive sad one) won’t listen.

When you, in your utter simplicity and loneliness, surrounded by friends and family, when the entire world starts crumpling in. The weight, I would like to believe, the weight on your shoulders has never been lighter. And as your body loosens its grip on control, fingers stiff from a life-time of unequivocal clenching, your graymatter flickers with a reminder, a flashlight slicing through the dark prism of your life: You Love Them.

I don’t know what happens once consciousness leaves your body (and is that what really happens?). I do know that when you love someone, you never stop.