There are different names for the same thing.

The longer I exist as a human being, the more I comprehend there are concepts of love we never have the opportunity to express. There are feelings that exist with no words, at least in the English dictionary.

The concept of loving something dependent on our care.

Loving a friend with no romantic inclination.

There is a love I feel for novelty. The new experience, the people who fuel my desire to go deeper and faster without reservation. This will not take long. This love is transient in nature.

There are people who inspire you to kiss their forehead while they sleep even if they won’t look at you in the morning.

Or the love you feel for your family late at night when you are alone. Realizing shared experience bonds you in a way words never could. Because history runs thicker than family but not nearly as fast or far. We are scattered together in our cowardly heredity.

Loving someone casually. Is there a word for experiencing someone else’s Personhood in a way that starts to make sense? How do I express the comfort of familiar hands and shared cigarettes? There’s going to come a time I finally notice the light fixture is pink, and has it always been that way or does sunrise have that effect on perception? Leaving in the morning is harder than I expect.

Then there are the yellow birds, those brief and intense eternities. The people who live underneath your skin; whose heartbeats you feel from hundreds and thousands of miles away. When I dream of lakes they taste like your name.

When a friend asks me about love, I tell her May 2013. I was trying to be a new me; a person who slept at night, and didn’t dream about girls with longdark hair. I wanted to be someone who could move on, but I still slept in her bed. My last night in town, in a city that used to be ours, she had a nightmare. Her hands grasping at mine to escape some fresh hell. Or old hell, or the hell she’d never tell me about existing in a place beyond repair.

She was leaving. But nothing felt real or stable the way we expect things to feel real and stable when they’re the right things. That night in her bed she didn’t know how to say goodbye the way I didn’t know what to say the day I left that town and never looked back. Except I looked back.

Came back. For her, and for them, and for myself because I had no concept of myself outside of that space. And maybe that’s what home is: a concept of yourself that exists beyond you. People know your mother’s name, or the first job you had and hated. People in that place see your scarred lips. They know you never gave up kissing bombs.

But that night there was me, and her, and the idea of leaving. There were six months of distance and history pressing heavy into my bones. The night she walked home alone. The night she wore exhaustion like a badge of honor. We tried to be anybody but ourselves in her kitchen over free soup and crackers.

Here are the facts: she had a nightmare that woke me up. Pressed hard into me like an animal escaping its own skin, curled into my body like salvation. And I held her the way I’ll always hold her. Which is to say like a last breath. Or maybe nothing like that at all.

She didn’t remember it in the morning. But her chest against my chest, me pressing hard into the smell of her. I read once that pheromones are expressed through the scalp and her hair against my face felt like timelessness. That’s the closest I’ve come to salvation. Holding her for the last time, knowing it was the last time; the everything of me converged in the back of my throat demanding acknowledgement.

Months later I retell the story under the purple-orange glow of god and streetlights, feeling small in a way I didn’t know was possible. She doesn’t know what it meant I say. I say My favorite memory will never be remembered.

The longer I exist as a human being, the more I know no loves are the same. The rush I feel when I see your name flash across a screen is not the same as your hand tracing the constellation of my shoulders. There are heartbeats beneath my skin I can’t begin to comprehend. But I keep trying. I keep existing. And if there are words for many types of love, I hope mine resembles patience.   

Angels on your body.

-b