Love is not a sentence.
It is not a declaration.
It is not a mouth-sound that becomes holy because it is spoken slowly or often or with trembling hands.
Love is load-bearing.
If it does not carry weight, it is dΓ©cor.
We keep trying to place a roof where no foundation was poured.
Then we stare at the sky, confused, calling the collapse fate.
A bond is not chemistry.
Chemistry is ignition.
Bond is metallurgy.
Heat plus pressure plus time plus repetition until something changes state.
If nothing has been tempered, nothing has been bonded.
You cannot love what you have not stayed present with.
You cannot love what you refuse to learn.
You cannot love what you routinely endanger.
You can want.
You can fixate.
You can attach.
You can orbit.
You can crave.
These are not synonyms.
Love is not what you feel when someone walks into a room.
Love is what you do when they walk out of one.
Love is not intensity.
Intensity is cheap.
A forest fire is intense (and destructive).
Love is slow, inconvenient, unsexy, repetitive.
Love is:
I noticed.
I adjusted.
I remembered.
I protected.
I repaired.
Love leaves fingerprints.
If someone says they love you but their presence erodes your sense of safety, your sense of self, your sense of continuity β you are not witnessing a complicated form of love.
You are witnessing an unexamined form of attachment wearing stolen language.
Love does not need to be defended with speeches.
It is visible.
It is boring in the way gravity is boring.
It holds.
Anything that requires you to explain away its harm is not misunderstood love.
It is misnamed.
Love is not a feeling you fall into.
Love is a structure that emerges when two people keep choosing the same small, ordinary acts of care long after novelty expires.
If there is no structure, there is no love.
Only concept, hunger and projection.
Which hurts.
But it is not the same kind of loss.
Love is not an adjective.
It is not βlove-ish.β
It is not βloving energy.β
It is not βI love you butββ
Love is a verb that leaves evidence.
Everything else is poetry trying to pass as engineering.
