“I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately” is a sentence that I have typed out on multiple occasions over the past couple of weeks with absolutely nothing else to follow it. And for a while, I couldn’t understand why that was when it seemed to be the only thing weighing on my mind.

It is a human survival instinct for our brains to cling to and recite our own pain back to us like a bed time story we already know the ending to.
I realize now what I’ve been thinking about lately is not actually love.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the absence of love. To this day, I do not understand how something not there can take up so much fucking space.

Because the anorexia did not love me but it cradled me even when I was skin and bones, never once did it flinch at the sharpness of my ribs or the coldness of my touch.

And the pills did not love me but they slurred my cries to sound like laughter, they took every one of my secrets to the grave they helped me dig.

And the coke did not love me but it stayed awake with me every single night listening tentatively as I confessed all my hopes and dreams until I no longer had any.

And the boy, the boy did not love me even though he said he did and I always said it back but I mostly said it first. I’m still coming to terms with the understanding that not all prayers are created equal. A confession is not the same thing as a promise.

I would like to start thinking more about love that stays.

Like how when I’m sad, Kaitlyn will start her sentences with the word “we” and it feels like a she’s making a pinky promise, one as hopeful as a future road trip, one as deliberate as a prayer.

And how every time Landon touches my phone or my car, he updates some setting to make my life a little easier. He does it without me asking. He is the only man who has never heard me beg.

And how Bethany genuinely asks me about my day and how she is just as excited to tell me all about hers. She spares no detail and I savor each one of them. She makes me feel the opposite of forgotten.

And even how I don’t like sitting on the floor, but I always do whenever I’m with Bre because I like resting my head on her shoulder and she always holds my hand. She makes laying next to her feel like sight seeing. She makes every other place feel like home.

To this day, I do not understand how the absence of love takes up so much fucking space.

To this day, I still forget about all the ways love never stops making room for me.