Love is All This

Love is All This
By Z Zoccolante

*Yay! Episode 3 of Throwing Up Rainbows is out! Or listen on iTunes and please write us a review so people can find us. Thanks.

All the many conversations I’ve had about love, the ones over coffee with a rainbow in the backdrop. The ones curled on the couch late at night. The ones that have been going on since the beginning of the world.

Love is a web, tendrils in all directions. Love is choice. Love is laughter. And I think about how love is happiness.

It’s a blue surf tricycle down a green grass hill, hair flying behind me. It’s my arms holding tightly around my dad’s neck as he drops down into a wave that little me thinks is a giant.

It’s that moment in the kitchen when my ex and I belly laughed so hard we cried. It’s sun on my skin, seeping into my bones. It’s that first kiss all electric and melty. It’s kisses years later on my forehead as he leaves for work and I’m still sleeping, the ones he stopped giving me at the end when I’d wake up and wonder, like missing parts of a dream.

It’s making cookies with my mom, and how many times she took us to the zoo to wander with the animals, and the day one bird made it its mission to poop on all three of us. It’s singing with my brother on the beach and laughing till no sounds comes out. It’s talking at night through long cardboard tubes snaking down from his bunk bed to mine.

It’s talking with my best friend in the dark on the phone at night like we’re teens instead of adults and feeling seen, known, understood, connected, laughing and crying like waves of ebb and flow.

It’s forgiving myself for my past, for my eating disorder, for being an asshole and all the hurtful ways I disconnected from others because I was scared of being swallowed whole.

It’s a marathon week of The Office in a new apartment with a futon on the floor and laughing so hard I thought, if I died right now I’d be happy. Love is joy.

Love is being pulled closer into a solid embrace of someone’s arms when you begin coughing up your lungs at 3 a.m. – enveloped, safe, held, protected. Love is present, memory, and ether like the delicate azul wings of a blue morpho butterfly. It’s showing up for friends and loved ones like they matter – checking in, responding, listening, asking questions. It’s sharing worlds and silence, touch and smiles. It’s being present. It’s treating each other as though we’re important, like we matter, like we’re worth the time, worth minor sacrifices, or large ones.

It’s falling through the sky and crashing into the body of ours. It’s remembering. Remembering.

It’s strange how we can feel so utterly alone and in the next breath feel so connected, boundless, drenched in love, swimming in its ocean. And then another breath.

Blue morphos flutter round whispering tales of past and future. I’m wrapped in my cocoon of blankets by the ocean. I’m watching a galaxy of stars dance in the night. I’m listening to the songs of mermaids and voyages that have become ghost ships in the waves.

I’m rooting myself. I am completely untethered. I’m a fish out of water learning how to breathe all the love that ever existed or will exist.

And when I leave maybe it will be because I have given all I had and received it in turn. Maybe I will be flush with all this, on the verge of explosion, bursting so hard I collapse like a white star, folding into myself like origami, leaving the bluest afterglow.

Love is All This