The first time I fell in love after living with a love grown cold, I remembered: we don’t love with our hearts.
We love with our eyes, our fingertips and hands and arms and legs and hips and thighs and tongues and noses and ears and lungs and bellies. We breathe love deep into our lungs, inhale it, sniff it, follow its scent into the next room. We caress love, pinch it, tickle it, stroke it, grab it, squeeze it, swat it. We ingest love, drink it, eat it, bite it, lick it, suck it, swallow it, digest it. We fall asleep from love, waken into it. We dream love. We dance love, lean into it, sway it, thrust it, gyrate it. This taking in of another – through our bodies, through our senses – until that person lives in our sinews, in our bones, in our connective tissue – this is how we love.
The heart is merely a vessel, opening and closing, a metronome ticking down the moments we have left, open to receive, or closed in protest. No one pumps in love’s nutrients, or removes love’s toxins through the heart. Without sound, without taste, without sight, without sensation, without perception of any kind, the heart cannot sing, savor, hear, speak or feel love. Or its absence. The heart just beats, keeping us alive until we’re ready to embody love again, until it beats no more.
I was so sure you’d always take my love inside you, keep taking me in. You didn’t.
You closed your senses to me, shut off every possible opening where I used to get in, dulled and deadened yourself until you stumbled away with a cold, empty body despite your still-beating heart, impervious to love as it thrummed all around you.
My whole body remembers, now, this thrum. And my heart does what a heart does: it beats, keeping me alive for one more feast, one more dance, one more love.