How does love get made?

Backtracking on some bloggy friends entries of the past year I found this, a poem by Sharon Olds, "The Knowing." Ever find something you wish you had written yourself? this poem is like that. It cuts right in deep, not one superfluous sound.

Later I was thinking about that term, "making love." I say it or hear it so often I don't remember ever thinking about what it meant. I wondered who the first person was to coin that phrase? How did they come up with that? All of a sudden it struck me as amazing. Creating something like. Not the old fashioned marital manual version of sexual euphemisms. ahem. no, but making a thing that is love.

Love. Is it an emotion? Is it a phenomenon? Is it a commitment? A recognition? Is it something made? or uncovered? discovered? ignored? Love within a sexual relationship, is that different than friendship love? and falling? how is that different from making?


I know my own experience in it, that's all. The last time I was in love was about 7 years ago. We had compatibility in many amazing ways, but he was newly separated when we met. I had a dream shortly after our first lunch meeting. He was with me in my bed, although not physically, but in my dream it was so vivid that I thought he was truly there, and he said, "I love you." and i heard the words ringing in my actual ears. I felt, still do, that the dream meant we had a connection that moved through time and space. It was more than a year before I heard him say that for real.

When he did he said he didn't remember when it started, that he'd loved me for some time. He made me look him in the eyes when he said it.

Sometimes still I wake up in the middle of the night aching for that truth.

But I never felt that we "fell in" love. I just felt happy with him. I have had the experience of falling before. And the experience of comparing other loves to that feeling and believing they weren't enough. The "fall" was what made it real for me at that time. Not now. not since my last love.

I believe that we can fall in love many times and also find many people who are enough to love romantically without that falling thing. now, that's what I believe. and believing it, how does that shape the love we make? there's something here about meaning, the meaning we attribute to these experiences. Probably lots of these things are shaped in us before we can begin to articulate them- cultural norms. But romantic love is a universal theme, cross culture, time and place.

That's all I have for now. Except for this: all this talking about love and theorizing, is it my way of kind of having intimacy without risking actually meeting new people? and risking rejection or some other kind of hurt? maybe I want some vague prince charming to see through my words to my, dare I say it, need. ? someone smart and creative who isn't a drinker/ drugger/ married who could love me with pulling my hair out, unemployed and sleeping in my car while I'm 50 years old? now I remember why i do this. It's a semblance of remembering, maybe. Maybe it's my way of making love.

That's not the only thing I do here, i do really appreciate the whole of you and so many wonderful individuals here who write and think and feel. It's something I just have thought about this week, though.

back to the original ideas.. How about you? how do you think love is made?

Big Guns, revisited

Reposting this, because Libya's celebrating 40 years since the revolution this week.

When I was 8 we moved to Libya. We lived in temporary housing for the first months, downtown in Tripoli. My brother was 6 and my sister three months old. My brother and i were like fric and frac, always the same height, identical coloring, people asked if we were twins regularly. Our birthdays were two years and two weeks apart. The first night in our new home we heard this godawful wailing during what seemed like the middle of the night. Very loud, we were sure the place was haunted and ran into our parents bedroom. They had no idea what the noise was. Turns out our apartment (4rth floor) was right next to a mosque. With loudspeakers, of course, calling to prayer, right at our level.

One day my mom asked us to go to the store for her. It was a few blocks from our apt. So we went, and my brother knocked a bottle of pop onto the floor, where it broke and splashed onto my legs and feet and into my shoes. Ick. I took them off, it was summer, preferring barefoot to sticking shoes. So we're walking along, I'm fairly small, btw, for my age, about the size of my 6yo brother. All of a sudden I feel someone's hand in my underwear, from behind.

It happened so fast it was exactly like that, my first awareness of it was feeling it, this guy had come up from behind me and lifted my dress and put his hand in my pants in one fast move. In the next move I turned to his smirking face and swung those shoes into his head, yelling. He was pretty big, about 12 or 13, and looked shocked. Then took off running across the street into a vacant lot. Another Libyan kid was there and saw the whole thing, he ran after him as I was screaming, in English, for him to get him. They disappeared into an alley and we went home. For the longest time I was afraid I might be pregnant. Seriously. Instead, I got a vaginal staff infection and antibiotics.

months later. One morning i stayed home from school, my brother left for the bus stop as usual. After about five minutes he's back, telling my mother he couldn't go to school because soldiers were shooting at the kids at the bus stop. My mom was pretty incredulous, so he told her to look out the window. I looked with her. He was right. Well, except the shooting was with blanks, after lots of warnings to get inside. That was our introduction to Qaddafi. and his army of 14 year old boys. Some of it's a little fuzzy, but that part is pretty vivid, how young they were. Like they'd been let out of school to play war, they were pumped up, riding around in the back of trucks waving their rifles and machine guns.

Martial law was in place for a while, maybe a week or so, like 12 hour curfew. My smart dad had thought ahead to get a hard core short wave radio to bring with us. We got all our news from BBC in South Africa. That way we knew about the revolution, all of it. It wasn't so bad, better because we were in an apartment building, so we could go back and forth to neighbors and we all shared food and essential stuff. In the end there was only one death, from someone shooting them self accidentally, as i remember.

My next memory is one afternoon going downstairs to the lobby of our building to see a soldier sitting there shooting the shit with the doorman. He had a gun with him. It was as big as I was. Well, that's the way I remember it, anyway. I backed up toward the stairs. At that time I wore glasses. He wanted to look at them, gesturing to me, speaking in Arabic, to take them off and give them to him. That would have meant getting closer to him. The doorman, in English, encouraged me, telling me he wouldn't hurt me. Not convincing. It was very scary, felt like a catch 22. Was he more likely to shoot if I ran away, or if I was closer to him. Was he mad at me already because I didn't give him my glasses right away? I ran, his laughter chasing me up the stairs.