On love, in alarm.

As a small child, I did not know you at all. You were surely present in the connections and life-long commitments of men and women much older than me at the time, but my curious and ever-active young mind, which was busy discovering exciting and endless little wonders of a very big world, did not recognize you. You were yet another stranger in a world full of unknowns.

During later, teenage times, I had seen enough of you in others to unveil a hidden desire to locate you and invite you to reside safely and happily inside of me. And so I set out in search of you within others, eager to have them share a precious piece of you with me. But nobody that I came close to actually knew you in the authentic and powerful way in which I believed you existed, in your truest form, and so you remained a stranger to me in a world a little bit less unknown.

With a few more years of wisdom and the beginning of a new phase of freedom and responsibility, as I left the convenience and comfort of dependable, loving parents in search of higher knowledge and opportunity, came a slight depreciation of my belief that I would ever find you in your fullest and most delightful form. Most of those around me at the time appeared to have discovered you long ago and were busy losing themselves in you with more partners than it seems sensible or safe to do. But I believed then, as I do now, that the expression of you in the physical form, although certainly enjoyable, is only one small piece of your complex puzzle, and provides a kind of satisfaction that is ultimately unsustainable—it is a part of you to which I have never felt that one should pay the most attention. By this time in my life, we should have already danced together to the beat of at least a few different sweet but short-lived songs. But the reality is that throughout the years, I had made a habit of watching you move with others while my back remained firmly against the wall—always eager for you to guide me by the hand out onto the floor, and at the same time slightly ashamed that I had not yet learned to dance. And so we remained strangers in a world that, by this point, I had realized I would never fully understand.

Today, I still do not know you. It is not this alone which concerns me so much, but the fact that I have not seen you within others in a very long time. My experiences in Africa lead me to believe that in this part of the world, you are seriously and almost universally misunderstood. Here, your existence is inescapably linked to intercourse, as if the two of you are one and the same. And if it is not physical favors that signal your presence, then it is surely the exchange of money and goods, as though you reside within such cheap, material things. The postponement of sex or the absence of excess income is a clear indication, in the minds of most here, that you are nowhere to be found—in fact, that you cannot possibly exist under such conditions—and the abundance of both means that you have, at long last, arrived. But such a simple interpretation of you discounts the possibility that you may, in truth, be much more powerful, fulfilling, and longer-lasting than that, and it prevents those who view you in such a light from ever discovering you in your truest and most authentic form.

I reject this understanding of you. To me, it appears juvenile and unsound. It is distressing. But if most of those around me accept it, without question, then I cannot help but wonder, once again, if I will ever find you in your fullest and most delightful form—one in which nobody here seems to want to imagine you may flourish.