EKPHRASIS OF MY LOVE
A love letter to my mosaic of love. Love through the ages. My labour of love that has lasted years. The love that I was born with, for the glowing skin and soft hair of my mum. For six months, I thought I was a part of her, and after eighteen years I must try not to be. I look at photos of me from when I was young, and my baby eyes looking at her every time. Is that not love?
A love that I grew to hold in my hand, to cup in my palm and slip into my pocket, like an injured sparrow is a love for my dad that stays in the green fisherman’s jacket that wrapped its arms around me in my pink corduroy.
I have a love for my brothers that must have been built when we were the same size cells, so long ago. Our love is in broken screens and Mario Kart and jumping in waves. I look at them and think I do not know you, but I know you, I love you but I do not love you, you love me but you do not say it, one day we will not live in the same place, and we will not call the same place home, it will just be Our Parent’s House. I know you do not think of this at all. Not in the way I do.
I do not remember the first love of a friend, and I wish I do. But I can tell you now that I know. I love my best friends in the way I love the night-time. It is silent and quiet and dark, and we do not speak about it. But we both know it is there, and that it always will be. I love it like the croak of the crickets and frogs, the flicker of a star that died a million years ago, waving to us for the last time. The crisp coolness of a summer evening, sitting in a hoodie on a balcony and lighting candles for the bugs. Simple. I love them like I love getting lost in the woods. When the trees tower so high that they spare me from the sun, and I take a step on hard soil and kick stones along a path, I think of them. The love is peaceful, it is what I have known for so long.
I love my grandad for giving me his bright eyes, and for telling me they would turn brown so I could eat my bread crusts and do as I was told. I love my granny for teaching me how to knit; the 4 coloured scrap scarf I cast on for the first time thirteen years ago wraps around my toy rabbit’s neck. He doesn’t need to know it is not always winter.
I love my grandma for dancing her whole life.
I love my cousins in a way where they do not know me and I do not know them, and there is so much distance to be covered we may never catch up, but we can see each other standing on the line of the horizon we never stop walking to.
Real Love: What are you thinking about he says, (and I wish I could let him crack open my head with his hands like a knife and a coconut, clean in two in the way they do on television. I guess I could ask him to do that but instead of being able to sink his teeth into thick coconut flesh, I’d be bleeding from the inside out. So instead I try to find the right words. You are sunshine! I want to scream. Not the stifling heat of June, but the kind that sinks into strawberries in spring and makes them taste like your hands in my hair. The kind that comes in spring, that you can feel in the veins of your skin and the pink in your cheeks. You are rain in the way that it always comes. Little April showers and I am clean. You are the rise and fall of the sun and moon, the light dancing on top of the water, and I dance in the webs of sunlight that scatter on the seabed. You are the feeling of floating to the bottom of a pool, the first opening and final closing of a book, slipping into fresh sheets, the penultimate crunch of snow. You are everything to me. I search for you within the cracks in the floor, the fades in the paint on the wall and the empty seats on a double-decker bus. I feel the bottom of my jacket pockets and the wriggle of my toes in my socks. I am trying to feel for you, and you are there. Every time. In everything, there is you.) “Nothing” I reply, my heartbeat spells out his name.
✯
I love myself, also. I love the baby that rolled under the living room armchair for ten minutes, who only knew her own name and how to laugh. I love the toddler who scrunched up her nose when she smiled and put glitter glue in her soft blond hair to have it be like the hair products Matilda’s mum uses. I love the little girl who ran in the road and drank juice and never beat Minecraft. I hug her every night and tuck her into bed. I love the girl who hated herself and her life, and who believed she would never be loved by anyone who didn’t just see what she let them. I am not her anymore. I find it difficult to find reason to love her, but I do every day. I love myself now. I love myself for having long hair and liking pink and trying to love femininity again after years of it being called a weakness. I love myself for trying to be an adult when I grew up too fast. I love myself for letting myself be loved and for loving.
I have so much love and it is the only thing I can give for free.
My love will leave, and my love will come back to me.
All that remains is love.
Maisie A. Gibbs, 18, York - England ✯ IG: @maisieiswriting
“I am an 18 year old student who moved very far away from Home, and very far back again, and now I am 2 hours from where I was born and 7 hours away from the rest of my family and it is very hard. I needed this love letter to remind myself that I always and forever have love, no matter where I am.”