THE CITRUS FRUIT

What is love to me?

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We will pretend like I didn’t disappear for two weeks straight. I’ve been hella busy. I mean busy busy. I’ve been shuffling Clinical rotations, preparing for exams, work, writing love letters, and trying out new stuff.

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Everyone talks about love and sometimes I start to wonder what I think. I’ve never really given a deep thought. Maybe I’ve spewed my opinions here and there from time to time but I’ve never really drawn a full criteria of what I think it entails. Conventionally I just go with what everyone assumes. 

In the last few days while making cards, writing love letters from one person to another. Helping people put their feelings in thought into actual words and making those bows and cutting it out, I realized how much I love love, how much I love being in love, and how even more I love to love people.

 
But I wondered, what is this “Love”?

While I wrote “You make me want to be a better person” in a letter addressed to a girl I don’t even know, I questioned how it is possible to single out one person and give all of you to this person. 

Why this person? 

Why not the other person??

Love makes the world go round they said but maybe not round, maybe it’s a straight line, zigzag, diagonal, something that has an end because if love was so perfect and so beautiful then it shouldn’t have to end between two people. 

You meet someone, you get talking, you figure out they’d rather sleep in than go out, rather eat fried fish than boiled one, and that their favorite color is blue. You become a part of their life. You wake up and realize all you think of is this person and even when you don’t have the navigation to your life, they give you bearings. They make you want to keep pushing even at your hardest.

The in-betweens of meeting this person and falling in love with them, I start to wonder what happens. 

Love is beautiful but love hurts. Love is like nailing a screw into the wall, when you hit the screw, it goes in and you like the feeling of being close to a drilled achievement but if the hammer slips and hits your hand, the pain you feel has no word representation.

Loving hard leaves you heartbroken. 

Learning medicine and I learned that emotions come from the brain but why is love represented by the heart. I figured it must be because when the heart stops, the entire body shuts down. This is an illustrational representation of love. When the people you love hurt you, you can feel your entire existence fading because they give you everything. They are everything to you. Their absence in your life would literarily make you shut down.

“I love you but every day I’m learning to love you better,” I wrote on a card addressed to a girl named Sheila. And I felt like Sheila is one of the luckiest girls. She found someone willing to learn to love her.

Loving someone is a process. It’s like an educational thing. You never learn to love someone completely. Because you’d wonder how the same thing you did to make them smile at some point is replied with no emotions when you repeat it. It’s because love is not static nor is expressing it. 

I have loved and I’ve been loved and both give you an unexplainable euphoric feeling. All you know is you want to wake up and hear their voice, make them the biggest part of your day, buy them their favorite snack, send them a meme that makes you think of them, post a picture of you together on social media, show the world how in love with them you are, spend your evening talking to them, sleep off after their goodnight messages with love adorned emojis, wake up the next day, rinse and repeat.

But what happens when love fades?

The void that nothing seems to fill. Doing everything to be distracted and get fulfillment but none of it ever works because the most important person in your life just disappeared and you have no way of bringing them back. 

The emptiness you feel. The absent good morning and good night messages. The absent random pictures of the day. The absent I love yous and I miss yous. The absent “Stay safe, talk to you soon”. The absent wholeness of the existence of that person in your life. You feel empty like your electrical current was shut off.

The tears you cry. Crying a river would be an inadequate quantification of the tears that run through your eyes. Every hour of the day you’d cry. Not because you want to but because you made memories with this person and all that memories do is hurt you when you think of them. You scroll through your social media and see all the moments you spent together and Snapchat reminding you of what you were doing on that day one-month ago-with the person that makes you smile the hardest. But you’re just there, with red eyes and a swollen face because you feel like you’ll never get your life together without that person.

The love withdrawal symptoms. The constant urge to text, call, rage. The anger you feel and the hurt you don’t seem to know how to process. You’re just there wishing they would walk through the door and say “let’s give it a try again. It is you I want”.

It will take time and then you’ll heal and you’ll love again and your heart will be broken again.

It leaves me wondering how love makes no sense and also how I changed a person’s words in his letter from “I promise to love you forever” to “I promise to love you as long as I can”. Because at the end of the day forever does not to exist in love.

Love is not the reason our grandparents stayed together till they were that old. Commitment and willingness is.

Love doesn’t make you want someone, maybe it precipitates it but the willingness to always see this person and the commitment of wanting to call the person yours for the rest of your life makes you want a person.

And when someone asks me what I think of love, I would say: 

“And when You think about love,

I hope you know it’s like roses,

It’s pretty but it has thorns

Love makes you smile 

Love makes you cry

As beautiful as love can be

It’s a pickle of heart

One that can leave you scars”

Because love is beautiful. Love is calming. Love makes you do the things you never thought you would do.

Love is intoxicating because Love is that insatiable want to satisfy all of someone’s needs and be all they want. Love is the smile you give off at 3 am while on a call with someone.

Love is the peace you feel when you’re around them holding their hands in silence. Love is the urge to cross rivers and oceans so you can hold by your side a single person. Love is seeing someone in a way no one else sees them.

But love is also crying and wishing for the pain that was not physically afflicted to stop after this person is gone.

Love is wishing you can try again and again but you can’t because they are gone. Pooooffff. Into the air.

Love is that tingling feeling at the back of your throat holding your tears down while you go about your day trying not to think about a single person.

Love is a sweet-sour feeling. 

Love is like citrus fruits. 

Love is what you think it is.

Love is you. 

And I hope when you love, you allow yourself to learn because love is a process. One that requires attention.

And if you’ve been hurt because you love, you will heal and you’ll love again and that might be the last because they will make you not want to love someone else but them. And you’ll live your life with them and they’ll love you like you’ve never been loved before.

Because everyone will find the right one who will love them and they’ll love back, it’s a matter of time.

Love is a merry-go-round.

Yours,

Adetutu❤️