Construction, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction of: Love
First phase: Construction of Love.
I was eighteen, sipping a cup of hot café latte in London during a random Wednesday afternoon. The name "Dilly" was graciously scribbled on the side of the cup, showcasing who I felt like my façade should be at that time of my life. My hair, which strands have been highlighted brunette-blond a month before, was uncontrollably flying in the wind as I walked the steps towards my summer school. I hugged my leather jacket closer to myself, trying to savour the moment of being cold in the middle of one of the world's most visited cities.
I stopped at the corner of the street, looking at everything and nothing all at once. The main street in front of me is getting busier each minute with unrecognisable faces that I would only see in these fleeting moments of my life, everyone was trying to get somewhere it seemed. And I was all alone, a bright eyed kid with nothing but lukewarm coffee in her hand and naïveté in her mind—but I was so loved by myself. I learned that I was able to be alone, able to bear loneliness amongst the crowd, able to be taken care of by myself, able to purposefully get lost, and able to be found by myself.
I understood love as something self-made, specific, yet not self-replenishing.
I knew there should be a way for it to be self-sustainable, but the demons they all stayed to feed and consume and conquer places in which this love couldn't reach.
But I was still warmed, cocooned, protected, yet exhausted.
Second phase: Deconstruction of Love.
I just turned twenty-three, only recently released my chapbook about the woes of my life and how I felt disconnected from everything. I understood back then that the love that I knew and I received, especially from my parents, was different, peculiar, and inimitable. That particular love built me into someone that I tried to change, someone that was taught by her parents that their kind of love should only be the one that she trusted even though it was tough, criticising, and unforgiving. Their love was unbearable to live with, even after decades of being smothered with it.
Two weeks after I turned twenty-three, I was kissed by the guy that I thought I could love or at least cared for. It was my first proper kiss, wine date included. It was proper since he finally gave me no mind games. With briefly-lived intimacy, laughter, inside jokes, impossibilities, and insecurity making itself known in the corner while I was trying to down my second glass of wine. The next day I received nothing, yet it should have been a sign that everything that happened in the evening before was just a grandeur illusion created merely to transiently sate my curiosity. At the end of that year, I published another chapbook. This time, it was to convey to him that the love that I felt for him was bred by insecurity, and helplessness?
That same year, though, I went to my most favourite place in the whole world by myself and afterwards I went to watch my favourite musicians played their music in a Mediterranean festival—even though it was partly filled with the aforementioned guy being worried about my safety, and also partly filled with me feeling insecure about his intention.
That year, I vowed to forget about love, especially romantic ones.
The love that I had was made by piercing everything together. Borrowing bits and pieces from everyone else that call love as home. I tried to build that kind of home for myself by erecting walls out of the splinters of my soul, creating grounds out of the unclaimed dusts of my mind, and building roofs out of scraped kindness from strangers.
It worked as a functioning house not yet a home—with rattling ceiling, uneven ground, and peeled off paint.
It worked. Until one day it all crumbled into dust.
Third Phase: Reconstruction of Love
Me finding him was unintentional, he piqued my interest with his black and white social media feed. Him finding me was equally inadvertent, a self-proclaimed listener that was interested in finding as many friends as he could have. Yet, us finding each other was fate, or coincidence at best.
It took quite awhile for me to convince him to meet me. We were both full of trust issues due to our past, yet I was more bold than he was. A day after meeting him for the first time, we decided to be exclusive and started courtship. Our first proper date was dining in a fried chicken restaurant—with him still not being able to look into my eyes while I was already being as flirty as possible.
We had all types of days afterwards. The first half of the year was filled with bickering, misunderstanding, endless cuddling, laughter, bottomless wine, pictures together, a laundry bag full of lingeries, sleepovers, and shared food. Self-invented bliss were everywhere, but we both were dealing with something new. Whilst I have never been in a relationship before, he has had long-term committed relationships, but not quite with someone that's exactly like me. We are so in tuned with each other that we understand the need to stocking up books (and reading them obsessively in one sitting while ignoring them for the rest of the year), the need to sit down together with hot cuppas while sharing about each other's day and woes, and the need to just be there with each other.
After the aptly named rocky road period in which we both experienced similar amount of misunderstanding and forgiveness, we arrived to the part where not every couple tastes: glorious intimacy. In here, we discovered that love could mean a lot of things at different time during different circumstances.
For us, love is a cup of iced coffee shared in the middle of a rush morning sipped and passed to each other, never permanently held by one person. Love is a silent cocooning hug, a sanctuary which we acknowledge, uphold, protect, and share with each other whenever words are too powerless to mend each other. Love is falling asleep on the either side of the bed with butts attached, tired enough to forget to turn off the lights. Love is holding his lit cigarette while he went to the loo. Love is being forgiven after repeating the same mistakes. Love is talking about everything all at once, words are flying all over the place, neither knows where one starts and the other ends. Love is communicating with eye contact and hand squeeze. Love is checking each other's temperature by touching forehead to forehead.
For us, love is to share, mine is for you.
After dismantling what I thought I knew about home, I found that home is a mixture of Creed's Aventus, mixed potently with the scent of laundry, clove, tobacco, and sweat.
I was eighteen, sipping a cup of hot café latte in London during a random Wednesday afternoon. The name "Dilly" was graciously scribbled on the side of the cup, showcasing who I felt like my façade should be at that time of my life. My hair, which strands have been highlighted brunette-blond a month before, was uncontrollably flying in the wind as I walked the steps towards my summer school. I hugged my leather jacket closer to myself, trying to savour the moment of being cold in the middle of one of the world's most visited cities.
I stopped at the corner of the street, looking at everything and nothing all at once. The main street in front of me is getting busier each minute with unrecognisable faces that I would only see in these fleeting moments of my life, everyone was trying to get somewhere it seemed. And I was all alone, a bright eyed kid with nothing but lukewarm coffee in her hand and naïveté in her mind—but I was so loved by myself. I learned that I was able to be alone, able to bear loneliness amongst the crowd, able to be taken care of by myself, able to purposefully get lost, and able to be found by myself.
I understood love as something self-made, specific, yet not self-replenishing.
I knew there should be a way for it to be self-sustainable, but the demons they all stayed to feed and consume and conquer places in which this love couldn't reach.
But I was still warmed, cocooned, protected, yet exhausted.
Second phase: Deconstruction of Love.
I just turned twenty-three, only recently released my chapbook about the woes of my life and how I felt disconnected from everything. I understood back then that the love that I knew and I received, especially from my parents, was different, peculiar, and inimitable. That particular love built me into someone that I tried to change, someone that was taught by her parents that their kind of love should only be the one that she trusted even though it was tough, criticising, and unforgiving. Their love was unbearable to live with, even after decades of being smothered with it.
Two weeks after I turned twenty-three, I was kissed by the guy that I thought I could love or at least cared for. It was my first proper kiss, wine date included. It was proper since he finally gave me no mind games. With briefly-lived intimacy, laughter, inside jokes, impossibilities, and insecurity making itself known in the corner while I was trying to down my second glass of wine. The next day I received nothing, yet it should have been a sign that everything that happened in the evening before was just a grandeur illusion created merely to transiently sate my curiosity. At the end of that year, I published another chapbook. This time, it was to convey to him that the love that I felt for him was bred by insecurity, and helplessness?
That same year, though, I went to my most favourite place in the whole world by myself and afterwards I went to watch my favourite musicians played their music in a Mediterranean festival—even though it was partly filled with the aforementioned guy being worried about my safety, and also partly filled with me feeling insecure about his intention.
That year, I vowed to forget about love, especially romantic ones.
The love that I had was made by piercing everything together. Borrowing bits and pieces from everyone else that call love as home. I tried to build that kind of home for myself by erecting walls out of the splinters of my soul, creating grounds out of the unclaimed dusts of my mind, and building roofs out of scraped kindness from strangers.
It worked as a functioning house not yet a home—with rattling ceiling, uneven ground, and peeled off paint.
It worked. Until one day it all crumbled into dust.
Third Phase: Reconstruction of Love
Me finding him was unintentional, he piqued my interest with his black and white social media feed. Him finding me was equally inadvertent, a self-proclaimed listener that was interested in finding as many friends as he could have. Yet, us finding each other was fate, or coincidence at best.
It took quite awhile for me to convince him to meet me. We were both full of trust issues due to our past, yet I was more bold than he was. A day after meeting him for the first time, we decided to be exclusive and started courtship. Our first proper date was dining in a fried chicken restaurant—with him still not being able to look into my eyes while I was already being as flirty as possible.
We had all types of days afterwards. The first half of the year was filled with bickering, misunderstanding, endless cuddling, laughter, bottomless wine, pictures together, a laundry bag full of lingeries, sleepovers, and shared food. Self-invented bliss were everywhere, but we both were dealing with something new. Whilst I have never been in a relationship before, he has had long-term committed relationships, but not quite with someone that's exactly like me. We are so in tuned with each other that we understand the need to stocking up books (and reading them obsessively in one sitting while ignoring them for the rest of the year), the need to sit down together with hot cuppas while sharing about each other's day and woes, and the need to just be there with each other.
After the aptly named rocky road period in which we both experienced similar amount of misunderstanding and forgiveness, we arrived to the part where not every couple tastes: glorious intimacy. In here, we discovered that love could mean a lot of things at different time during different circumstances.
For us, love is a cup of iced coffee shared in the middle of a rush morning sipped and passed to each other, never permanently held by one person. Love is a silent cocooning hug, a sanctuary which we acknowledge, uphold, protect, and share with each other whenever words are too powerless to mend each other. Love is falling asleep on the either side of the bed with butts attached, tired enough to forget to turn off the lights. Love is holding his lit cigarette while he went to the loo. Love is being forgiven after repeating the same mistakes. Love is talking about everything all at once, words are flying all over the place, neither knows where one starts and the other ends. Love is communicating with eye contact and hand squeeze. Love is checking each other's temperature by touching forehead to forehead.
For us, love is to share, mine is for you.
After dismantling what I thought I knew about home, I found that home is a mixture of Creed's Aventus, mixed potently with the scent of laundry, clove, tobacco, and sweat.