Birds do it. Bees do it. Flowers, trees, girls and guys on nights like these. And girls and girls and guys and guys and every gender between and beyond. I don't do it, though.
I don't fall in love.
Last time I did it was a compromise: I fall in love; he gives me everything I need to feel safe. It doesn't work that way, though. Took me 40 years to understand that.
I don't know how much love I've given away in exchange for promises made mostly to myself. I don't know because I can't say with certainty that it was love. I can say all of whatever I did give was done with a sense of urgency.
I do know what love is, though, as deeply and assuredly as I know how and when to use italics. Love is little dogs and big fresh places. The great outdoors and my freedom as I move through it. Love is smelly black cats that sneeze in my face and wild, greedy birds that linger long enough atop my head to poop comfortably. Love is me as I glide over ice on thin blades of steel and glide down highways with round rubber shoes. Love is cousins willing to tell me when I've said something carelessly hurtful. Love is receiving messages from thirty people sending the same trending crow meme I've seen a thousand times already simply because it made them think of me. Love is the feeling that my best friend is here cheering me on and helping me clean the apartment even though she's been dead for half a decade.
I tell myself that because I know what love is, because I am healed, I am ready to find it with another person. A partner. But there is a big difference between ready and healed. One is by no means a determinant of the other. God knows my history is proof of that. I am not ready. I want to be monogamous with my self love a while longer.
Maybe forever.
Who knows.
This is my entry for the #monomad challenge, held daily in the Black and White Community.
Give it a try. Or don't if you don't want to.
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