What Does Love Look Like?

But it's not a poem.

I read, in a poem or a prompt for a poem, early in the morning, still bleary-eyed: In another life we wash one another’s hair. And I am instantly somewhere else. How many men have washed my hair?

When I met my husband—who was then just a strange man—he washed my hair in the small shower of a house I only visited once. He has never complained about the hair on the shower wall, or on the counter, or tangled in our unwashed bedsheets. For him, even a piece of me has always been something to love.

We are thinking about love; how can we not? When the sun is out but the world is so dark, I send voice notes begging my friends to grab onto the nearest thing that can float. I try to collapse all the men I have ever loved into a singular you—it’s more gorgeous that way—and then write a poem. But the poem doesn’t come.

When you were diagnosed with cancer, I selfishly thought, I am so glad he left me. I could never hold that. I couldn’t see him thin and in pain—not that man who once held so much power over me. I need you strong in my memories. I need you drunk on cheap wine, playing the guitar. I need you in flannel in Montana. I need you to always drive. I need you in the kitchen with a dishrag on your shoulder. I need you not to call me back.

I try to think of others, but it seems there was only ever you. Who else did I love? The one who played the Beatles on the old piano and who I accidentally lived with for ten years. That wasn’t love. That was growing up. Or the one on stage who would never have sex with me, but invited me back to his hotel room every time he came to town and sent me letters from Europe. Was that love, or just a distraction? Or the one at the beach house—the one who taught me to cut garlic in a tiny apartment with sand on the floor. That was love: young, burning to the touch.

And before that—the first one. The one we never talk about. I have a photograph of him with the skyline in the background. He’s wearing jeans, his white, crisp boxers showing at the top. It’s 2005. He’s smoking a menthol, shirtless. That was love.

What does love look like when you have a whole life of it?

I have parents who never seemed to be in love. Between them were vows and a family and a lot of financial strain and even more left unsaid. All I knew growing up was that I wanted something different. I respect their love the way one respects a peaceful treaty between countries with little in common. They care for one another. They take care of one another. They dole out medicine and buy the right crackers. That is love. They built a whole life around what was missing between them—though even I know it wasn’t always that way.

What am I trying to say? That love eludes. That love is a house we build. That I’m luckier than most. That I still love you.

I didn’t even mention you—the one I had to write a whole book about to get over. The one who was my best friend. That was a kind of love, the kind you have to leave. It nearly kills you, because if you don’t, you won’t grow right. You’ll grow crooked and mean, taking things that do not belong to you. Sometimes I take my kids to the same beach we used to go to for sunset, and I think about my life like a Venn diagram—how, if you fold it, her and I are walking the same shoreline. How all she wanted was exactly what I have now.

I set out to write a love poem, to capture all of you in it. But I seem, as always, to have captured only myself.

a film shot of my husband I in the summer we fist met, drunk and young and in love.