What About Jen?
The Misadventures of a Baltimore HonWhat is Love? Baby, Don’t Hurt Me. Don’t Hurt Me. No More.
We are small children giggling on a vast playground. Our little legs run near the sandboxes. We chase each other over to the swings and I kiss you on the face.
It’s junior high, no-man’s land of folkways. He’s holding hands with Miss Student Body President. We take our well-worn, eleventh draft of our “like” letter and rip it to shreds.
It’s our best friend’s first party where boys are allowed and we’re late deciding to stuff or not to stuff our bras. We’re all enchanted by that first dance as everyone watches.
We go on first dates that lead to more firsts. We crack each other up over some dumb flirty joke after dumb flirty joke. We start to grow up. We meet someone after someone after someone. Then we meet the one. We touch. We affect. We love.
What is love? Is it that first date, where it’s all nerves and anticipation? Is it when he brings you movies and Uno cards when you’re sick in bed? Is it discovering new interests together, popping sashimi into each others’ mouths while standing at a Superbowl party, experiencing first concerts, first holidays, first anniversaries together? Is it meeting the parents, getting married, long walks in the autumn under a cobalt sky? Is love the first time you cry together, the first heated disagreement, the passionate touches and holding each other so tight your hearts knock against each other?
It may be all these things, and each time they happen thereafter. And there will come less pretty things. Unlike romance, love doesn’t tarnish or rust after a storm.
When I think of love, I think of how God so loved the world. I think of sitting in Greg’s laugh, peeing on him because he’s made me laugh so hard. I think of my mom, laying in my childhood bed with me in the middle of the night after we played Super Mario Bros. for six hours and I was too afraid to sleep because I couldn’t get the Bowser music out of my head. I think of my father, who taught me to start fires with flint rock and sew beaded deer hide moccasins using sinew.
I think of how we stay up all night sometimes just to put a smile on each other’s face to to make their lives easier in some way. Or forgive each other, even when it’s a struggle.
I think that’s it. I think love is mercy, serving, and fun. Did love mean anything else?
Oh yes. Love is sex. You know it. Sex sex sex.
