WHAT IS LOVE?

Words by Grace Atta

I’m terrified that I loved you. That our late nights on the phone were love letters sent across state lines. That your picture made my heart race because it was telling me to start running to you. Maybe I’d catch a glimpse of your smile. My eyes were the lens to the camera in my mind, that stored all the little, incomplete memories. Half-real, half-romanticised moments from months of replaying a look I never thought I was worthy to have. What is even more frightening is the thought of not knowing that deep, heavy, lightness again. I used to float in an ocean dragging me to whatever shore you decided to reside on. Some days, I found myself on a jetty or at the top of a lighthouse, squinting against the wind. You were gone. Every time. Only footprints on the sand left for me to trace, with reaching shrivelled fingertips and a body that should have drowned three weeks in. But you would call for me again. A booming voice through stadium speakers. A crowd of 7 billion people, and you would ask for me by name. I have learned not to blame myself for the times I responded the way I did. Acting as if I was a coat on a hanger, just waiting to be put on by you. Let me tell you the true terror of this world. Are you ready? If you teach a person that love is to be earned – to be taken away faster than it was ever given – they will spend the rest of their lives trying to deserve it. They will look for butterflies. And what’s wrong with butterflies? Well they’re not really butterflies. They are bees that sting and make you swell with hives; hives that fill your throat with cement when you ask them why you are not enough. Why isn’t this love? Why do I feel so uneasy? Like the drop of an elevator going three floors down. The blurry nausea of a rollercoaster on its second up and around. Like the sway of a boat in crashing waters on a blissfully warm summer day. I discovered I feel this way because this is not really love. This is the fear of not being loved. And yet I’m terrified…that I will never learn what love is. What is love?