Love is wherever love is felt, and with love being a complete statement, well, that’s enough. By Addie Citchens  Illustration by Jillian Tamaki I don’t know shit about love. It’s the eighties and no one is doing it right, especially not my parents, or anyone else’s that I know. The women in church are pressed flat by love’s duties, its labor; the men, outwardly stern and inwardly duplicitous, eye anything that jiggles under a skirt. These relationships end in heartbreak, in death or divorce. This is the one-sided love my grandmother taught my mother, the love her mother taught her. It is the type of love women trade their youth and their goals to sustain. When you ask these women about love, their mouths speak of fulfillment, but their eyes say: this is a raw deal. I don’t know shit about love. I am a twenty-year-old undergrad, infinitely more familiar with books than with the bodies of others. He is a big, brown, smiling country boy with a gap in his teeth. And although my mama warns me that the gap means that he is a liar before the living God, I trust him completely. Because, though I am certainly aware by then that people cheat on each other, I am not aware that someone who can make every cell in your body buzz in concert can also arouse that same energy in another. And another. This is when I skip love and go straight to heartbreak. I don’t know shit about love. While my friends are starting families, I am moving from state to state, collecting experiences and trying to find myself. Romantic relationships are like TV shows that I watch until an episode turns me off, making me never want to think about them again. I develop a habit of sampling folk, rather than boxing them up, even when I meet a pretty, big-legged Texan lady with a sweet smile, a huge laugh, and hugs that make me feel hugged all day. I think I am learning to love, but in fact I am learning to break a heart. I don’t know shit about love. Neither does he, but he has a beautiful face and a sad story. In his yard, there is an orange tree, bowed by ripening fruit. I’m excited for the tang of fruit, for the happily ever after. When we move in together, we make a home out of things given to us by his grandmother and my mother, who meet only via phone, where they bond over a shared devotion to Jesus and their hopes for our future. There is delight when I become pregnant. If I know nothing about love, surely growing a baby will teach me. But I miscarry right after Christmas, and we break up on Valentine’s Day. I don’t know shit about love. But I am learning, both from what I devour and from what I spit out. I reconnect with someone from college. After the formalities, we share a splendid evening, and, as we cruise around later looking for something to eat, they say that they love me. Although at that exact moment I feel the same thing, I say, “You don’t love me. You love what we did.” They go on to haltingly explain that love is wherever love is felt, and with love being a complete statement, well, that’s enough. The idea seems revolutionary. A diorama of love, hold the heartbreak. I don’t know shit about love, but I find a little in the night I spend with an exquisite Honduran, who shows me that the name Addie can sound like a supplication, and that making love should feel that way, too. I find some in the evening with a firefighter I have crushed on for years, an encounter that makes me realize my imperfections are perfect landing spots for kisses. A delightful bit of love on the day a colleague and I skip work and prove that love should break beds, not hearts. I am in love, and this love is defined not by its duration but by its intent. There is love wherever there is a shared goal to create it. Other things I learn: love should be planned and spontaneous. It is not possession. It is always temporary. I’ve also come to know that love is all around me. It’s in the person whose arm I grip on a turbulent flight. Or in the stranger who asks to borrow a pen before we end up sharing life stories. Or in anyone who sees me just at the moment when I need to be seen. All that is love, too. Read all the sidebars in our Love & Heartbreak collection from the Fiction Issue. | 
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