I'm Learning

3 days ago

1 min read

By Ammara Elsevier

PROMPT — What is Love?

I’m learning that to love someone is to know them against their will.

When you look at me, you’re blind to the wall behind you and the shadow you cast upon it.

Never have you seen the back of your head or that bony ridge where your skull meets your ear.

You can’t possibly know the specks that gather on your scalp beneath the silver,

and still you pray that no one else takes notice.

Yes, to be loved is to be understood for what we are and not what we long to be,

though for that longing, too, we are loved.

You have seen the blood and licked it clean.

I have seen the virus and breathed it from your mouth.

We have suffered this illness, and we have held on all the same.

I think that to love someone is to know already what they feel like, but in spite of it all, it is to keep a knowing palm pressed against the small of their back.

Ammara Elsevier is a graduate research fellow at Columbia University, with the Committee on Global Thought. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology and French Literature and Culture from George Washington University in Washington DC, and she was a French Honors Scholar with the American College of the Mediterranean in Aix en Provence. She is a Baltimore native and currently lives in New York City, where she works, creates, and explores.