To Love Is To Miss

Whispered in my ear were the words, Je t’aime, oh je t’aime de tout mon coeur.

I really don’t understand this; what does it mean to love with all one’s heart? Does it mean to love in your hands? Does it mean to love in your words? In your looks? In your mass? Je t’aime. Je t’aime. A dizzying string of je t’aimes.

I only smiled at him on the metro earlier today because I was melancholy, yet now there is a collarbone on my lips and smeared scarlet lipstick on them. And while I’m closing my eyes and whispering meaningless words, I am thinking about how to me this stranger is exactly what I never want to be to anyone else: a hollow body. A sad, sad shell of a human that takes up space when needed. And I am thinking that if I were asked what it is to love, I’d answer that to love is to miss.

Every night in bed, I tell myself one hundred times that I am just a body, just a body, just atoms and cells and veins and a heart. Just a body. But I am always crying by 27 because everything I tell myself is really just a lot of bullshit. I am not just a body. I am feelings and heartaches and tears.

And here I am, hurting and being hurt, listening to gasps that are not mine, busy being lost in sweet memories of lavender fields I have not been to and skinny girls I am not, and praying to God, “God, are you there? I don’t want to be in love anymore”.

And I knew it since I first exhaled a disappointed “fuck” at the age of 11 and I know it now: I am reaching for something that is not. Reaching, reaching, always reaching for things far too impossible.