What love looks like

Do you remember the Oily Stickers from the 80s? When you pressed on them the oily colors swirled around and sparkled. They were truly mesmerizing to my child brain. They're still around, I guess. I only know this because my niece had a few. She sent me a card she made and stuck one on it. I sent a photo text to her dad to confirm receipt of said card and his response was, "She gave you that?! That's love."

I'm not good at love. I don't understand it. I don't know how to do it in a way that other people recognize it for what it's intended to be. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about it. Dissecting it on my laboratory table with razor sharp tools that slice and parse the meat and bone into separate piles. When I'm done all I have is a bloody mess. There's no longer anything that resembles the shape of love. Only carnage. I guess you can't pick a thing apart and expect it to be what it was before the operation. I suppose that's why love has a magical quality to it. There's something ineffable about it that evaporates before you can peek through the lens of your microscope. It's greater than the sum of its parts.

That's Love. I thought about that for a long time after my brother said it. I couldn't resist pulling out my scalpel and making an incision or two. Why would she give me her favorite sticker; something she cherished and enjoyed? Sometimes kids are great for distilling meaning down into its essential elements, yet untrained in the grown-up art forms of bullshitting, saving face and pretending not to feel. 

What I settled on was that she gave it to me precisely because of the fact that it had brought her joy, not in spite of it. It made her feel good and she wanted to share that feeling with me. She wanted me to feel joy, too. That's Love.

I don't know how to do that. I'm selfish. I feel pain and I want you to feel it, too, to suffer like me. I want you to understand how hard it is. I feel pleasure and I want to keep it all for myself. I'm thirsty and starving and cold. You can't have it. You don't need it like I do. I suppose love is not possible when you can only think about yourself. I don't know how to keep the ones I love strong so they can tend to my wounds when I'm too weak to stand. I want to be the last man standing at any cost. When I falter I knock you down as many pegs as I need to still be on top. In the end I'm always alone. Will anybody ever love me?