What Is Love #1

A Thing You Do Alone

I am trying to make some sense of the act of being alive and I can’t seem to. Maybe the trying is the problem. I have the gnawing feeling that it has something to do with love, but what in fact is love?

I was about twelve years old when it dawned on me that the only person in the world who is always with you is… you. This revelation made it feel like I was gaining insight into a secret of the universe. No one told me this. I just figured it out on my own. I was incredibly proud of myself because it was true and undeniable and was the exact opposite of what every TV show, movie, song, and bedtime story had suggested. The realization felt like the beginning of my life.

I should say that this realization came to me in the moments after I learned that the couple who were temporary taking care of me were getting a divorce from one another. Which was itself a few years after my mother left me with this couple — her brother and his wife — while she moved three thousand miles away to start her life all over again in a better way, a way that didn’t involve me. It was also a few more years after my mother and I went through bouts of hunger and homelessness and violence and sexual assault separately and together, and even a few more years after she came to get me from where she had left me another time few years before that with another of her siblings while she went a few hundred miles away to start her life all over again in a better way, a way that didn’t involve me. By the time I was 12 I had already had…