A few days ago Google announced the word "love" among the most searched words this year. Type in the four letter word and you will get over 2,130,000,000 hits. You will come across definitions, concepts, even scientific models of chemical or psychological basis - lust, sex, intimacy, commitment, passion respectively. You will find listings of cultural, even religious views.
When you search for love on the internet, it seems easy, quite simple - you hit the 'enter' button on your keyboard and in 0.8 seconds you get a vast number of choices of what you are looking for. Browse through some thousand love quotes, poems, lyrics - line after line, love is all spelled out for you. Or flip through a children book. Watch some Hollywood classics or visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and see its exhibit "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy" - the word love is everywhere to be found, whether spoken by Humphrey Bogart or written in paint across a canvas.
You know love, when you see it. Like the day I watched a little girl with curly hair and big eyes flung herself into the arms of her mother, crying out: "Mom! I missed you. I missed you so much!" You feel it. Like the day I was lying on a park bench in Berlin and rested my head in my dad's lap, while he gently stroked my hair.
In Denver, Colorado, I had the chance to read a poem I wrote. Realizing that there were no words left for me to use, to describe that feeling I took for love, I settled for an abstraction instead. Love does not need an explanation. It is either there or not. Some of us have to learn this the hard way. Like my friend who learned that someone he loved, loved someone else. Yes, you know love, when you see it. Enticing. At times brutal.
No matter how much it hurts, we find ourselves grateful for the love we were able to give and to receive. And for the moments yet to come, when we are able to love again. We will just have to sit down once more and google it again. After all, we have 2, 130, 000,000 choices.
© Colleen Yorke. All rights reserved. 2017.