To love is to love when one embraces, that sudden collision of two solitudes, and it is to love in the hollow silence of listening. It is the exhaustion of understanding and the quiet, crystalline mercy of forgiveness. One loves in the unbearable weight of waiting, in the cooling touch that relieves, and even in the sharp, holy needle of affliction.

It is a hunger. To love is to lack, to need with a thirst that feels like the very beginning of the world. It is the vertigo of being loved, and the vast, cold desert of when one is not.

The Geometry of the Soul

We love in the soft folding of a welcome, in the shimmering vanity of a glance, and in the breathless shock of admiration. It is the word spoken, and more so, the word withheld. It is the possession of the “now” and the aching void of the “missing.” We love when the heart is deserving, but perhaps we love most fiercely in the dark injustice of the undeserved.

The Seed and the Bloom

Love is the silent, wet seed germinating within the mother; it is the vigilant, protective shadow of the father. It is the slow, tangled growth of friendship and the violent, vivid color of sex, that brief moment where we cease to be “I.” It is the scent of gratitude that lingers in a room after someone has left, and the heavy, ripe fruit of charity. In the lover, it is a flowering so sudden it feels like a wound. It is, finally, a communion with the pulse of the universe.

Only He knows the salt of my sweat and the raw, hidden linings, the avessos, of my being. I carry these inside-out versions of myself along the path, struggling to turn each syllable into a living verb within the Soul.

I adorn myself with my own contradictions: the brightness of a smile and the salt-smear of a tear. I am counted by the rhythm of arrivals and the hollow echo of departures, by the sun that blinds and the night that reveals. And through it all, a voice from the innermost center, a voice that does not use words but is understood. whispers the only truth worth knowing:
That one learns to love only by loving.

©️ Beatriz Esmer