Love’s Lexicon

Love is the thing that has me bring my husband warm milk in the evening. It’s the same love that has him spill it out when I’m not looking because he knows it makes me happy to serve, but doesn’t necessarily want it every night.

1. My first language is love. It’s pure and selfless and true. A state I am looking for constantly, and while I’m most comfortable there, speak it fluently, mine is a difficult dialect to master. That dictionary is in constant need of revised editions.
2. My second language is guilt. She came to me easily, sought me out in fact, circled back to me in my darkest hours. Ever present and convoluted, guilt knows me in my silent recesses, will snake its way into my peaceful quiet until I let it swish inside my veins. The vocab list I have on this is quite extensive but is always open to new entries.
3. Language three is gluttony. A panoply of gluttony. Not too much — there is too much to lose! I don’t drive drunk; don’t smoke with the kids; I try my damndest to not eat myself into surgery or diabetes but a seesaw teeters as it must. I wish someone would give me that exact point of no return so I’d be able to pull the reins in time and stop pushing at the edges of the periphery. Or sanity. See, just enough to let guilt do her magic again.
4. My fourth language is English — flowery, expressive, complicated and wonderfully simple. Words tease me, spilling from my fingers and the only safe place in my brain. It is not any less painful to find the metaphor to express how I feel, than to actually experience it. Ok, maybe a little, but it makes me probe at it over and again, find different angles to poke the bruise so that it resurrects itself for other people’s consumption. One more thing I can’t get right (please refer to number 2).

Love looks at me this same way 25 years later. Brooklyn Botanic Garden 1997.

It is love I come to, over and over again, because it is the love that attaches itself to all of my successes. Guilt swallows whole; love makes me sing and dance no matter how many knocks I take. And it’s the love I whisper at night.

Love comes downstairs with me as the sound of my old dog follows behind into the kitchen, paws clacking on the wood. Love is the thing that has me bring my husband warm milk in the evening. It’s the same love that has him spill it out when I’m not looking because he knows it makes me happy to serve, but doesn’t necessarily want it every night. Love is the thing that helps him not to list for me all the ways I have embarrassed myself indulging in the gluttony (see language 3).

Love comes in paid insurance and oil changes, in cleaned out carafes and trips to the supermarket. Love makes all the travel arrangements. Love changes with me, only wants me to enjoy the sun, basks with me in our children’s well being. Love, while it may not always listen, falls asleep with me on the couch, snoring away contentedly.

Love is everyday and hopeful. In the end, I suppose, it’s my first language and I’m most comfortable in it; my first words return to me over and over so that I can parlay them into something magical later (see language 4).