Love has no beginning or end

By Linda M. Crate

PROMPT — What is Love?

I think sometimes we're in trouble when it comes to love, because there's so much focus on romantic love and who you're dating or you're married to. But familial love and platonic love are so important, too.

Love is simply holding space for someone, being there for someone, sharing fond memories together—whether it's sharing food, going on a small or big adventure, simply spending time together, and knowing one another more fully. Love is being there in both good times and during the hard times, caring about someone just as deeply as you care about yourself, and wanting to know more about them and their life. Love is connection, love is appreciation, love is soft, love is kind.

Sometimes it is the grand gestures, but it can also be as small as offering your arm to your friend with balance issues so they don't fall. Or letting your friend take a nap when they visit you because they've worn themselves out mentally or physically. Sometimes, it is cooking for someone else when they're too tired, washing the dishes for someone, cleaning their house. Love is in showing up for the mundane every bit as much as it is about the magical.

We've weaponized therapy speak so much that people think boundaries are self-care, but all it is truly doing is ripping friendships apart. You cannot be selfish, self-seeking, dismissive, rude, and cruel and still believe that you are a good friend or full of love, because you're not. Love is patient and love is kind. Boundaries aren't meant to be walls. Someone asking you for help doesn't mean that they hate you or that you should ignore them simply because you don't want to. Love is showing up even when you don't want to, like taking out the trash for your disabled or injured family member or just showing up for your depressed friend by simply giving them the comfort of knowing you're there for them. Sometimes love is saving a spider from being squashed by running it outside or ensuring you don't step on a bug on the sidewalk.

Love isn't simply an emotion, a poem or a song. Love has deep roots and deep compassion and is care for another person. Which is why I've always been the friend that loves harder than most of her other friends.

Maybe one day I will find my people, the ones who love with a love beyond love. Because my love has always been unconditional and giving and I've found a lot of people's love is not like mine. A lot of people try to place conditions and restraints around love, and that's not really love. Love is deep and wide as the ocean with no beginning or end.

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Linda M. Crate (she/her) is a Pennsylvanian writer whose poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has fifteen published chapbooks, the latest being: not your piñata (Alien Buddha Publishing, June 2025).