The Elasticity of Love
Before you, I imagined love to be a feeling that transpired after meeting a threshold. That through nurturing the different elements of a relationship - all of the dates, texts, and sex - I was steadily building toward this threshold, and only once the threshold had been met or exceeded would I feel love, could tell someone, “I love you,” and truly mean it. I imagined love as a moment or epiphany, something solid and tangible. In fact, before you, I thought I had experienced such moments, brief snippets of time with ex-boyfriends where I thought that I felt love lucidly, and then the feeling would fade away just as quickly as it had arrived, always fleeting, just out of reach.
What my friends told me about love was, “you’ll know it when you feel it.” What I didn’t expect was for the feeling of love to flip my threshold framework on its axis - that love wasn’t something you worked your way up to saying or feeling, but rather, an emotion that came pouring forth uncontrollably, a broken dam run rampant.
Nobody told me that love fills in vacant places in the heart and mind, mends old bruises, can make you feel whole even when you didn’t realize a piece of yourself was missing. That love can energize you and make you want to better yourself and give yourself, all of yourself, to someone else. When we talk about love, no one tells you the extremes to which you will go to nourish it, grow it, and grow from it. We seldom talk about the elasticity of love, the game of tolerance which tests how far love can expand and contract before resuming its normal shape or breaking altogether.
I didn’t anticipate how the miles between us would bring us closer together. That love extends past oceans and mountains, through blue screens and airwaves.