Love so asexual. So borderless, like a world that fits on a map and a continent, without oceans.
Love so simple, the love of a 6-year-old boy and his friend. There is no locker room, there is no football field, and where there is, they are sheltered by youth. Youth itself is a tired fence and comes down with age. Some grow up and keep their intact; my grandma, who has seen poverty and lawlessness and abuse and violence and seen her own country crumble beneath her into the war-torn terror zones that it is now: she is still so innocent. I cannot say the same of myself. I cannot say the same.
I miss that love. Now it is this: it is to please a boy, to make him want you with the push-up bra and the high heel and the makeup that washes off with every night, knowing that it has done you no good that day. The love that is that of a man, to think he loves a woman but just sees the grey eyes and not the sadness in them, the organic curves of the hips but no bruises at all. He hears a laugh, but not the pity.
To be a woman is a horrible thing. I have read Something Wicked This Way Comes, how women are bound to the earth and carry a legacy and men do not. But it is a horrible thing; man can be free. He can be without a shirt and it is completely acceptable. He can run and sweat and work and change and move and drift and never be tied down to anything. He is a free entity. The woman will always have something to hold her back. Always. She will always be waiting in a quiet corner; for a pregnancy test, for a phone call, with hope, for someone she loves. For women, platonic love is so natural. Too natural. But we are all stringed to something or someone from the time we are born to the time we are put into a grave. We can never be free; I want to be free. All I've ever wanted was to be free; truly free.
Freedom comes from God, I am finding out everyday.
Finding God is so simple in a quiet room, as is everything.
But when there are those people; that make you feel as if you must be a certain way; act a certain way to make an impression. Then I lose you, God. You are lost somewhere in between dreams and myself. There are two sides I have found: I can be liked or I can be loved.
Being liked involves nothing.
Being loved involves everything. Every ounce of focus and willpower and want and choice that you have; if you want love, the true love, you need to give everything. Surrender to something, and it will love you. Like a dead, beaten dog at the bloody doorstep of a warm home in winter. The dog that is well fed, that has a collar and a clean coat; he will never find a home because he will soon be found by something that will not see him. But the other dog, the defeated and alone, he will be pitiable and be fed by a hand that knows him. He will be bathed by arms that hold his neck at night, that gather his belly in its fullness and scoop him from underneath, to bring him to a warm pillow in the dead of night; to sit and sleep until dawn. I will never be loved because I am afraid.
I was once in what I thought was love. But instead it was a love that should have stayed a friendship; it was unclean and it was wrong, but it was so beautiful because it came from an abyss I do not know. It did not announce itself, as love never does. But I was and I am so, so young: too young to believe in anything substantial, or so I am told. So I am rebuked.
I know how to "do" love over again if I am given the chance, and I know how to get there.
I know all the steps.
I know it all.
It is the worst thing to have all this knowledge and absolutely no courage to execute it.
