Yet Everything is Love
I don’t think I ever saw my parents kiss.
Holding a photograph I pulled from a homemade photo album, I stared at the image unsure of what I saw. What I was sure of was that those were my parents, their lower torsos, my father’s hefty hand hovering over my mother’s waist and her tidy French-tipped hand barely resting on his chest. Her fingertips just tickled the fabric of his shirt. Despite their faces unpictured I could sense their smiles like how one suddenly comes aware of watchful eyes without seeing them. Although phantom I felt their pulled back lips, the same way I’d fall asleep before Dad returned from an evening out and awoke in the middle of the night, the house feeling different and knowing he was home, sensing he had returned. It was a shift in the atmosphere, a shift I was unable to put my finger on, yet it touched every inch of my skin.
When I pried my mother later on why she had asked someone to take such an odd photo, with an air of disinterest, she answered avoiding my eye contact.
“The woman was confused,” she said. “She didn’t speak very good English.”
The photo was taken on my parent’s trip to Bermuda in the mid-2000s. When I first saw the image, I didn’t think anything of their lacking affection. But now, I can basically smell the irony oozing out of the photo like puss from a long untreated wound. I thought that what I saw between my parents growing up, the intermittent fake smiles, and spurious moments of fleeting affection, was what love looked like. What marriage looked like. After my parents separated, I slowly realized that the kind of love my parents had towards the end of their marriage wasn’t between the two of them. Rather, it was a romanization of their memories and the love they had for their children that kept them together.
Just as there are no two people with the same exact trauma, there are no two same kinds of love. We are often taught that love is one thing: an intense feeling of deep affection. However, for some of us, growing up we saw something different and more complex in our parents. The ways they choose to love one another is what we subconsciously plucked from their relationship on the notions of what love looks like. What is love? For some it is like breathing and blinking, for others, it's like bathing and balancing. Just as in the ways we express it, each person's pilgrimage to the sacred place it dwells is singular. Many things are love. The smile from a stranger, listening to the rain, cheek kisses, comfort, someone's fingers in between yours. When you break it down to its simplest form, love is just a word, a word that when granted can have so little or so much meaning. Nothing is quite like love. Yet everything is love. Its existence is solely within us, and it declares its presence in nearly everything we do. It takes growing up, however, to notice that love isn’t just a romantic connection between two people. It goes far beyond that. It can be in the flowers they deliver, the glasses of wine they pour, the side glances they give, the hurtful deeds they commit, and the arguments they start. But it can also be in a kitchen wrecked with love, a flourishing garden, a lost cat sign posted on a telephone pole. It can be nearly everywhere if you look hard enough and beyond the thing itself.
We spend our days deciphering why things happen and why people do the things they do. We pour through our memories for reasons, pulling words and meaning from a moment. When in fact, if you tear the topic to the bone, scraping away all the soft layers of skin intersected with puckering scares and years of exhaust, underneath you’d most likely discover that it's love pumping through its interlacing veins. We are built out of and with love. So perhaps so are our issues and doings, even the most elemental of them. Love is our driving and deterring force, it gives true meaning and reason. Yet, it's a paradox, you must give it to get it. To know love is also to know hate. To feel love is to also feel pain. It's in the emotions that it evokes that we simultaneously find stability and instability, simply because it can take any form. That’s why it can be the reason behind most things in our lives, even if it seems so far from any affection. Because love isn’t just about affection.
Now when I look at the photo of my parents, I can only think about how the non-English speaking woman captured the reality of their relationship. Even though their love was seldom displayed publicly, towards the end of their marriage they still “loved” one another, just in different forms than we are taught about how love should look. Now they are divorced, they truly didn’t love one another as husband and wife. Yet, if you break it down, they divorced because they wanted to love again and no longer felt it the way they wanted to. Even when it may not seem like it, it's love.