The relativity of love.

Love. A relative concept. A personal concept which makes it the most lavish word, and the hardest to define. Love has been used to build, protect, nurture, destroy and maim.

I am in an introspective place. I have been loved in my life.

I have been loved, in the purity that comes from a child’s eyes when they are still blind from the womb. An all-encompassing, animalistic love that is honest in its survival. A love that stems from instinct and self-preservation.

I have been loved. In the way, a child lights up when you come in the door. Loved in the huge wondrous way where you know in you is vested the entire universe. That the strings attached are so instinctual you rarely feel them and when you do you welcome them and willfully create more so they are a tangled golden glimmering rope of love that chokes you with its silken intensity.

I have been loved in the muttering, shamefaced way only a teenage boy can manage. A love that is understood but should never be mentioned. Where hugs and kisses belong in a minute second, in the privacy of the house. A love that is to be ignored at all odds when his world is looking.

I have been loved by family. In the frustrated, unconditional way of a parent loving their progeny despite the many momentary desires to desert them for being so utterly annoying in their ways. The love of siblings, Honest, caustic, even painful. The one that comes with the assurance that I will on occasion cause you misery, but will cause serious harm to anyone else who tries to do the same to you. There is nothing like sibling love. In its ability to cut and heal at the same time. Only a sibling will love you while telling you what an utter waste of space you are.

I have been loved in friendship. For some, the love has been a foundation spanning decades, of family turned to friendship. For some, the love was fleeting as we took different ways and the love faded as they crossed the horizon.

I have been loved. I talk 0f the love of songs, poems, and movies. Of the bigger moon, the brighter sun, the raised leg after a kiss. And in the relativity of love, I have been loved by men who loved indiscriminately, where their love was a club, more a harem and I was to accept admittance. I have been loved, accompanied by harsh words, followed by soothing words, then harsh words, and the cycle of love continued. I have been loved where their love for me became a crutch for their fear that I would go and their love became a prison of they’re making and my residence by habit. I have been loved in ways that the world deems not as love, but the lover sees it as love. Love that sort to smother me, break me and almost succeeded.

I have been loved from afar. By many who surprised me by finding something in me that inspired them, influenced them. I have been loved and I did not know it, until the love was gone.

I have been loved. And hated by the person I could not escape. Myself. Where I flagellated and ignored myself. Until the love of Him and care of others helped me see who I am. I now love me, in the calm contented way of an inland body of water, with the occasional turbulence of adverse winds and internal quakes.

I have been blessed with love, in many of its translations, in ways deserved and undeserved. Each in its way made me grow. And yet it is when I was cared for that I felt precious.