What is love?

(Baby, don’t hurt me.)

Love is getting frustrated when you can’t do anything for the other, no matter how much you want, to the point where you just want to punch walls and kick buildings, to the point where you want to destroy something beautiful, just to make the other even more beautiful in comparison. Love is the biting sensation in your chest cavity, dull and constant, the pain flaring when you smile without meaning and numbing, exploding into pockets of joy when that smile inevitably becomes real, solid, tangible. Love is every smile, every frown, every laugh, every tear, every twitch and twinge of your facial muscles. Love is wanting to hide every bad, evil thing that drips from your mind in evil, lazy tendrils, if only to give the illusion that maybe you might sometimes deserve the other. Love is emphatically emphasizing every good, wonderful thing that radiates from your heart in wonderful, brilliant rays of light, shining into every crevice of every crack in the world. Love is knowing, memorizing – by heart, by mind – every texture, every sight, every scent, every taste, every sound, every feeling ever possible of every inch of everything and still wanting to know more. Love is opening up your rib cage and letting that bird of a heart inside your chest fly away into the storm, because you know that you hope that you want it, despite every bolt of lightning that splits the sky and every rumble of thunder that shakes the earth, because you do want it and you know it’s worth the electric currents sweeping through your every pore and fatigue overtaking every muscle fiber in your body. Love is feeling regret after a burst of anger, clamping down in your veins and arteries, clogging them and bogging them down with the weight of a thousand tons of sandbags. Love is the amplifying of every feeling you ever felt, from abashment to zealousness, over nine thousand times, until you’re left as nothing but a pile of smoldering, tender, raw emotions, and you can’t help but to feel everything, all your receptors set on maximum, all your nerves working double overtime. Love is amazing and beautiful and confusing and daunting and exciting and fresh and gargantuan and horrific and intimidating and jubilant and Kafkaesque and laudatory and merry and new and overrated and perfect and quaint and resilient and scary and troubling and underrated and virulent and worthy and xenophobic and young and zany. It’s all these things and so much more.

That is love.

(Baby, I love you.)