When Love is Finally on the Table for All

When you're young, love is this overly abundant resource that can be mined, harvested, and absorbed from every possible space. You pluck it out of the air, you drink it in gulps, you practically breathe in the sensation of adoring the world at a constant. You "love" your parents, your friends, your dog, recess, cake, balloons, summer, toys, that park down the street—everything. Then you meet your first crush that stirs up the pretty butterflies with prettier chainsaws and suddenly "love," in all its new variations with all its new complexities, is the craziest, most absurd thing to ever befall Earth.

Love is still pure then. It's basically like your heart is always spinning in a meadow. It hasn't been chastised, corrupted, or completely undone. It's just more in your sinuses, your gut, and your dreams now than it is in the world around you.

Then you get a bit older and you realize the good love is the hard love. It's the kind that demands your attention, that asks questions of your inner-workings that you never even wondered, and the poundings in your heart begin to battle the throbbing in your head. You can't explain shit and you're already recognizing the strange habit people have of barging their way into your love. People want you to know what you're doing wrong, how it can be helped, and why there's another way. Even people who don't know you now have opinions. Everyone wants to tell everyone else what love "is" or "should be." But to you, it's still philosophy, not mathematics.

And then you get older still, and you get your love picked apart, reassembled, and gorged upon by government and religion. Even as a concept, they want to run it through machines. They want to evaluate and discuss it like you're not there, perpetuating the idea that, sometimes, a beating heart ain't worth as much as the next one. You get weirded out by it. You get sickened by strong opinions of bodies, no longer just people.

Finally, after everything, years of watching "love" go from dreamscape to science experiment—in exaggerated theory, of course, since love in its purest form is the indefinite mainstay of decent folk everywhere—all you ever want to fucking hear is some powerful group that has some leverage in this slip-n-slide of a society say, "All love is on the table for whoever wants it," and you wonder how in the world anyone ever doubted their initial gut reaction in the first place. Damn.

Glad to see some kid hearts in the Supreme Court these days. Good work.