“I am not sure what love is”, they say, “would you please explain it to me, what does it feel like?”

And I have felt love aplenty, I understand the needs of biology and hormones that inform it, the sense of duty or the twisted logic behind the unhealthy choices we keep tripping into. I also know how it feels like when love webs and slowly vanishes, making the same soft but crackling sound the autumn leaves do as the wind scatters them. Or when it morphs into something dulled, soft and malleable, yet durable.

But what do I know about love?

When I was little they told me love was when someone said “I love you!”, and if they said it fiercely enough, if they grabbed onto you with enough strength to leave a mark, then it must be true. Even if it came after a slap, after many unkind words, some screaming. Screaming was supposed to be love.

Is it?

Then love was showing your true self despite the risks of rejection and derision, love was taking someone else’s place to spare them and sacrificing yourself, changing, wanting someone to be happy even if that means they are not with you. All plots of Disney movies watched and rewatched in the darkness.

But what if love just happens?

What if love does not fit into words, what if it escapes all definitions attempting to pin it down and exists between the spaces, can you still feel it? Maybe love is what wooshes through your chest sometimes in a tight, concentrated blow, expanding it painfully. Maybe love leaves you feeling kind of happy, kind of sad all the time, as if loving is the same as being alive, feeling everything in every moment and in-between. Noticing what a beautiful sky there is today above you.

I think love might be that.

It might be a half smile that rises unbidden, the spark that brightens your eyes when you’re speaking, no matter how mightily you try to resist it. Love might very well be whatever it is that rises in me whenever you open the door.

Shit.