“I want enough time to be in love with everything.”

Marina Keegan

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

The elements are so easy to love, they compress everything into a drop, a flame, a rock, a breeze. I love every mountain when I love this struggling pebble. Smooth and kissable. I love everything when I love you. I love you. I love everything

Because of you, each day is a melon slice
smelling sweetly of earth.
Because of you, all fruits reach out to me
as if I were the sun.
Thanks to you, I live on the honey of hope.

∆ Nazim Hikmet, opening lines to “Because of You,” American Poetry Review (vol. 31, no. 1, January/Feburary 2002)

How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love", we were saying "I think I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love"

we exist because love exists