Love Vrb Def

At first I thought it was the smell. Not anything spectacular in the idea of a divine aroma and nothing so repugnant that it stuck in the memory. When you lie in bed and you are saturated in the smell, I thought that was what love was. Not the smell itself, of sweat and lust that lingers after sex, but just the fact that I smell like that. And when I sniffed his arm around my chest as I kissed it, he smelt the same. It was the aftermath of the ultimate union. In the same way you can tell two people are married, even if you never saw the ring. You could tell we thirsted for each other and lay satisfied, because we smelt the same. I wonder does he ever think about marriage.
I thought that was what love was. The pure single defining fact that had no longer explanation than one word. Love. Then I got a little worried. If this was what love was, it was a bit disappointing. I felt a bond in ecstasy with him, that wasn’t where the ideals fell short. But the idea that love is when we both stink. I love the smell, it lets the nose understand that two sweaty steaming bodies yearned to be closer and closer all the time. But the smell itself doesn’t define it. But I know I was close to understanding, so close I could smell it.

The term “bad egg” was an understatement. If a bad egg hatched into a horrible monster and that monster grew up and was able to lay bad eggs. That’s what my parents thought of him.
“My baby isn’t going to end up in prison with scum like that”! They didn’t see him for who he really was. Only I did. He told me. This kind, misunderstood soul whose heart was only matched by his body, by how good a lover he was.
“You’re our little princess and he is a fool. We just don’t want you to get hurt”. But he wouldn’t let anything harm me. He would become an animal, and I would see it, when I was threatened. He wouldn’t let anything happen to me. And the more they said such nasty things about him, the more pissed off I was getting. The more they spoke, the more they sounded like closed minded fucks. They have no fucking right. I closed my eyes and screamed, then, I told them what a stupid bitch Mum was being and a hypocritical dickhead Dad was being. How they didn’t understand him, how I have the right to be happy, and how they can’t stand that.
     Love is roaring at your parents in the name of him. That sounds…almost right. Like the smell, it’s an answer, but not the answer.

I pushed his arm away. My naked body needed to be alone. It needed to understand. I love him, I was just a little confused physically. I was wondering was he wondering too. Things felt…out of place while we made love. And now things are looser and confusing. For the both of us I thought. He did things to me, I did things to him, and I didn’t know what to feel. Maybe that was it. Love is exploration, making the unknown known. But I still didn’t know.
     I rolled over to ask him. I wondered what he thought defined love. He had a smile that couldn’t have been gentler. That smile and that face seemed to put a sun in the room. Almost like a child. I said nothing because I understood. Love is wordless. It’s the conversations, long and deep, that are had and unheard. I smiled back, held his arm, and put it around me.

If only I knew what was coming, I would have never assumed what love was until later. Tripping goes beyond description. Like telling a virgin what fucking feels like. Imagine Gia revealing herself to you. That the heartbeat, the pulse of the earth courses through you. And the things you see, Jesus. The colours, the shapes. You can tell what the best painters were doing to make them the best. I thought about how revolutionary it would be to paint this. People would see the world in a brand new shape, size and light.
     I remember now. He had a piece of paper on his finger, and I had one on mine. And we placed them on each other’s tongues. Then, shazam! I travelled I ways only God could understand. I looked at his hand. All our friends were on couches and the floor, but it was just us, just me and him. I knew he was going to put his hand on mine before he did it. Then I started to see streams of skin pull away from his hand like paint, dripping away as if the whole world turned 90 degrees and his hand was wet on the canvas. The long streams of colour reached my hand and melded with it, before he placed his hand on mine.
     Love is some sort of skin joining vibration.

I know what love is now. And not everyone goes through it, even married couples sometimes miss it. Our gang (I always smile when I call it our gang) was getting shit from another gang. Before he said it, I went “We don’t take shit, do we babe”? and before any of us knew it, we were fighting in the car park. At first nobody would smack me, but it looked so fun and since none of them had the balls, I took down one down with a kick to the balls, then did the same to another, and smashed his face when he looked like he was about to get up. Then someone hit me. There was shock, then a sort of rush, like everything it meant to be human doubled. I would nearly have started thrashing our own gang. I was outside myself.
     Then love came. I looked around to see how good we were doing. And he was punching this guy over and over again. And I could see the bottle, in a hand, attached to legs running at him and a mouth roaring. I ran. I was worried I couldn’t run faster because everything was going in slow motion. He turned but he was too late, he could see the bottle but do nothing in time.
     I punched the bottle wielder in the face. That’s what love is. Not specifically taking down someone about to bottle your man, but being there to take him down. That’s truly what love is, and we had a moment looking at each other, then moved, thirsty for blood. Love, it’s a verb.
     I knew we would be hungry for flesh that night.