Love lost is nothing compared to the loss of the little things in between.
For love in name only—stripped bare, cast out naked to walk the streets—is a terribly ignoble thing. Perverse in its own way. And damnable.
What good is love without palpitations of the heart?
What good is love when the sight of you no longer sends me into catatonic states of ecstasy? What good is love when my breath no longer hitches, caught in my throat, at the very utterance of your name?
Love, for all its enormity, overshadows the tiny, minuscule “nothings” that, when summed, equate to a ponderous and weighty “everything.”
It can obscure, hide, and deflect until you finally turn it over and realize that whatever was meant to be underneath isn’t there—or worse, it never was.
I know your love, not because of your words, but because of the thousands of inconsequential things that occur too quickly for the eye or heart to comprehend.
Like how the barest suggestion of your neck blows my heart out of my chest.
Or how there are days when a single word in a single text is a banquet for my famished soul.
Like how thinking about your very existence brings me to sobbing fits for reasons I can’t even begin to explain until I feel utterly mad and yet sane in equal measures.
Or perhaps it’s that even when I’m around you, I am filled with such a deep longing that my bones ache because even though you’re mine, body and soul, it’s still not enough somehow.
Throw away the word entirely. Banish all mention of love, and I would still know precisely what it is. I don’t need to hear it defined, explained, or demonstrated. You exude it, my dear. It cascades off of you in warm, transcendent tendrils. And I feel it, my love, in every part of me.
So let us cast off the word. It has no meaning for us. What we have can only be grasped at in the in-betweens—the tiny moments only we share, only we know. And in that way, it belongs to us.
You wreck me, my love.
eidolon poetry 