You learn to love in bits and pieces. In anecdotes, in vignettes, in prose, in chapters, in flashbacks. You learn to love as you drive down a hill, as you look at the blue gate looking for the person you wanted so badly to take the drive down with you. You learn to love by forgetting, and thinking the blue was black, and what the person last said. You learn to love in wanting to remember, in retracing photographs and paragraphs of ink, in taking the drive back, in getting lost, in never finding what you're looking for. You learn to love by regretting. By giving up. You learn to love as you are born, as you put your infant bones against you mother's aged skin, you learn to love as you learn to pity, as you look for an abandoned kitten having heard only its cries, you learn to love with time, as you outgrow the world and as the cosmos grow around you, because someday you'll be bigger than the earth, but you'll always be the universe's darling star. You learn to love as you run out of space for it, as the world burns, as your flesh decomposes, but someday you will learn, that to love is to live, to hold yourself dear, and to be held by others so.
