Love is the bridge between you and everything

Of course, it was Valentine's yesterday. How could we have missed it.

I almost put a question mark there - you know, after that last sentence - but it isn't a question so much as a knowing eye roll. An eye roll with enough cynicism to prove how, like you, like them, like everyone with a Twitter account, above it all I am, except I don't mind, not really. I quite like love, and I reckon we've got a hold on all the ways it shows up for us. We know love is romantic, but also platonic and familial and sexual and sometimes, I suppose, more of a fondness than a love, but love is as good a word I know for fondness. For caring about another person. Maybe it's as simple as love is... remembering to give a damn.

I wrote two things on two separate postcards over the new year, and one of them was "Love Fiercely". The other was "More, whilst also enough", but we're not talking about that right now. We're talking about love. About remembering to give a damn.

Albert Ellis wrote that the art of love is largely the art of persistence, which I think is true. Persisting with caring. That's why I needed the reminder on a postcard, because I forget, ashamedly often, that love is a verb. There is so much doing that needs to be done, in love.

The most loved I have ever felt was at my first book launch, I think. One hundred people celebrated me, and mostly, it wasn't about the book. It was about doing the thing I said I would do and the ones who bore witness to that. And I complain about how we - "society" - only recognise traditional rites of passage like marriage and babies but when it mattered to me my people came and they roared.

The truest thing I know is love. Love as connection. Love as help. Love as a cooked meal. "It's up to you, not about you", said Sonya Withrow, and is what I think Jeff Buckley meant when he invited us to fall in light.

That's what love is. It's the light.

I have a tattoo on my left arm that says just show up and when I got it, I meant to my laptop to write or to my sneakers to train for another 10k. It means something else now. It means show up for my people, like they showed up for me.

It means love.

Everything does.