I’m not your old man, but if I were…I would tell you the only thing that really matters is love. Everything else is transitory and withers by nature, despite nurture. You will become bored with anything else in time; the color of a lip gloss, the painting in a museum of lovers along the Seine, if you stare at it too long. Things will tarnish and need burnishing to bring them back to life or make them useful again. Love hones a new edge in interaction, so it is always ready to sever or save
Gender doesn’t matter – all or none. It only matters you love. It ensures you understand the textures of life. You can feel its weave, the rough of the corduroy or the smooth of the silk. The fray of the edges and the stitch that secures it. It is the only way to learn that a tug or snag on a thread and the fabric shreds, yet tying a knot can hold it, keep it whole and ensure its purpose.
I’m not talking about the love you have for your parents, that relationship is a requirement whatever its nature. It isn’t the person you were expected to be with, although it can be. It is not the wall pin-up or the picture that comes in your wallet. It is not the slick image in the box on a screen or some tik of the tok. This love comes with no choice. It exists in space never filled before. It doesn’t matter the identifier; he, she, they, them, no matter the grammatical consequences. The presence of love opens vistas unknown before.
It is not sex – mind boggling or boring, perfunctory or palpitating, rocking your world and carrying you from the throes of a Saturday night to reading the Times naked in bed on a Sunday morning and turning from the Arts section to have at each other again. That lasts a breath. Love lasts so much longer. It is built by warp and whoof, by scaffold and brick and in the roughest of seas steadies the tiller and guides your way like a compass always pointing true north.
You can live without it or within the confines of a false front, but it diminishes you. You can lose it through death, through foolishness, through things not even of your own making. Those losses are profound. It is why we mourn for it after – a spice in your life is gone. You losing you. But as painful as it may be you have felt it. You have tasted it. You have experienced the swell in your chest, breathing together, the enlarging of your heart, the lump in your throat, the quickening of your pulse. Those things never go away.
You may be fortunate and have additional bites at the apple and each can be newly glorious, but never lose sight of the others. They are not yokes. They are stepping stones. They are your preparation. They were champions of love so you are capable of recognizing its true measure each time it appears.
I remember riding in a carriage in Central Park on a crisp fall night. No longer a young man, but with a new love. We had dined on Chateau Briand and a rich merlot. We looked at each as new loves do in candlelight and when done crossed the avenue to the carriages and snuggled under blankets rolling and listening to the tapping of horse hooves and seeing crystalline stars in a deep sky. It all felt first time. A never before experience. I know I carry, like a satchel, all the before loves in my life, but they don’t muddle the experience they enhance it. It is through those lenses I recognize I have never felt this way before. I am forty years from that moment and continue looking at that same woman across a myriad of tables, in candlelight or fluorescent, we ride in cars or on bicycles, murmur or yell, laugh or cry and still this venture is an adventure graced by all the years together and all those that came before.
So, make room for love everyday. Allow your heart to feel it fresh, to break and mend and risk it all again. There is room for love in a tested heart. There is space for love in an expanded heart. It is never full, it is always ready.