Love
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
Love is impatient to see one’s lover after a few hours, weeks, years of voluntary and/or involuntary partings. When one loves, one cares so much he/she is restless to thread fragmented misunderstandings between and among houses, generations, continents, conversations, sexes, galaxies, lifetimes. But love prevails. Hence, it chooses to wait, for love is willing to stretch its capacity for patience. Patience becomes a view of the horizon, but one doesn’t know if it will divide or connect the heavenly and the worldly. Love chooses today, it chooses again tomorrow.
Love is harsh, you know. Love can be unkind when rain pours so sudden and so furious and you have no umbrella and raincoat and no shelter to run to and your clothes hugging your body and your shoes clinging on to your feet get soaked and your bones, your skin, your spirit turn cold and numb. The lightning that follows reminds you of the all-pervading fleetingness. If promises to the community, always the community and the shared poems and meals and vulnerabilities with a lover, a parent, a friend, a leader are impermanent, then so can be abandonment. Even the white taxi on the city highway announces, “Come and Go”. Amidst severance, love hopes for reparation.
But first, it must spring from kindness, one that is sourced from the ugly, desperate, messy tears that yield the eyes to flicker its last seconds of flame. Soon, it must be extinguished completely for an unknown terrain of eternal light awaits. In the meantime, the lover has no idea. Love is envious of the other love because love must be a giving that equally gives. Love leaves you abandoned in the middle of a crowd cheering for the shirtless Rockstar on the stage. A lover has never felt so alone. Coming to grips with confusion and meaninglessness, love gravitates you to the lowest of lows and, in turn, humbles you. The Rockstar has quit the stage. Left with nothing but vastness, a lover is allowed to rest in longing. To be, just be. The lover refuses to go home but he/she must return home because, ultimately, love delights in naked solitude.
Yes, a lover gets angry. A lover remembers the wrongs, hence all the pain. Pain is not even the word for it. Love hurts because it demands for wholeness always, never halfway, never maybes, never phrases of let’s see. When a lover chooses comfort over courage, a love is refused its rightful space. Love leads to neglect of appetite, torturous breaths and movement, love collapses every word, thought and spoken. But true love endures no matter what, so lovers protest and do not tire raising their placards. Love struggles and grieves and persists for all the truths lovers have yet to learn.
When the ripe time comes, love rejoices with the truth, at the intersection of intellect and intention.
Love does not protect you from impatience, harshness, envy, pride, anger and other kinds of weaknesses. But it reveals everything – in the spectrum of melancholia and suffering, love means to persevere in “seeing”, or at least a lover should try to. Love is expanding the circumference. Of course it doesn’t come easy, but love forever hopes for that “goodness”, that natural, pure-like faith and trust we have as kids, only when we fully tend to the trauma and nurture our inner child. Love delights in naked solitude. The more often we dare to love, the more our hearts soften. Or so I hope.
Dear, never ever believe what they say about love.