So much of the physical world can be explained using science’s most fundamental laws —that neither energy nor matter can be created or destroyed, only transformed. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, the day dedicated to the celebration of love’s many manifestations, I’d like to posit that love, too, follows a similar set of laws. Love cannot appear, cannot be manufactured, cannot be abolished. Instead, love flows between reservoirs and forms, taking on new shapes, painting our lives with a spectrum of colors. It’s a law that is fundamental to human behavior.
Love is constant in our lives only in that it’s the currency of living. In its magnitude and manifestations, love is as variable as Knoxville weather. Love at its origin is transformed from friendships, from serendipitous collisions and even from forced proximity. It builds from these unnoticeable beginnings to a riptide that will knock the breath out of your lungs and push you to your knees. Sometimes love grows beyond the confines of your soul, your love-holding vessel, and when it escapes, it shatters the very core of your being.
You feel its absence like a hole in your heart, and no amount of clutching at this hole will quiet the hurricane of pain coursing inside. You thought that in this moment of heartbreak, love left you, but you were mistaken. That love flowed into a different reservoir. You may recognize it now in the newfound love you have for yourself, the love you have for your families and closest friends, the love you have for living at the very pinnacle of happiness. And still, those fading shapes of love from your past will stay with you as pressed wildflowers in old journals.
You’ll look on them fondly and retrace love’s shadows as you thumb through the pages of your own history. We experienced love for the first time when we came screaming into this world as infants, finding comfort in the feeling fed to us by those who cared for us. That love will be remade infinitely as long as we live, with our last breath pushing this love into the hands of those we leave behind, the most valuable heirloom we have to offer.
To quote Cheryl Strayed, writing here as Sugar, perhaps the only person I’ve encountered that has captured the eternally variable essence of love in writing: “It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and ‘loaded with promises and commitments’ that we may or may not want to keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the mother[loving] shit out of love.”
Love is infinite, ever-changing, mind boggling. It will carry you.
Kenna Rewcastle is a senior in College Scholars. She can be reached at [email protected].
