What is love?
Is it making cookies for your new neighbor? Is it picking flowers with your girlfriend? Is it watching French films and drinking a glass of wine? Is it not killing the wasp in the room but opening the door so it can go back outside?
Does love have to be an action? Can love just be words? Can love just be a look, a smell, a taste, a touch?
Can we love without saying a word or performing an action or even being in the same room as someone? Can we love those we have never met but want to meet? Can we love those we will never meet because they do not even exist?
Can we love by leaving? Can we love by giving up? Can we love by making others sad or angry or suicidal?
I watched this strange and comical and witty and brilliant film called Cold Souls. It was about a man who felt as if he was stuck in a hole and couldn't get out, so he decided to have his soul removed. But instead of feeling better, he felt worse. So he decided to pick out a soul. He picked out a Russian poet's soul, and decided to put it inside of him for two weeks. But after he did this, he felt as if he was slipping away because he was not what made him him. So he went back to get his soul, but he discovered that it had been stolen. So he decided to hunt down his own soul, the thing he didn't even want in the first place.
Maybe this has nothing whatsoever to do with love. But then again maybe this is love.
What, really, does that word even mean? I mean, we use it so frequently for so many different things. We say, "I love your shoes!" and in the next breath say, "I fell out of love for my husband."
Well, did you fall out of love with your husband the same way you will look at those shoes in a year and think, "What was I thinking buying these ugly shoes?"
Or we tell someone we love them, only to break up with them three months later and move onto the next relationship. Then, in this new relationship, we tell them we love them. Is there a difference between the love we felt for the first relationship and the love we feel for the new relationship?
Love is just so complicated, I suppose. But I feel like it should be the easiest thing in the world.
In the film I mentioned, the main character tries at one point to put his soul back into his body. But there is resistance - his soul does not want to enter his body again. So he has to put on these special goggles and look at his soul and try to reconnect with it again so that it will want to go back in his body.
When he looks into his soul, he first just sees a white, empty room. "I knew it," he says, laughing sadly. "I knew it would be empty."
Then, he finds a trap door in the floor of his soul. He opens his trap door, and finds pure beauty - his mother pregnant with him, his wife when he first fell in love with her, his grandfather smiling at him.
At the end of the film, he is trying to locate the soul of the woman that helped him, a Mule (the Russian women who carry people's souls inside of them from Russia to America so that we can have their souls). He finds her soul, but the doctors say that the spot where the soul goes is too full of fragments of all the souls she has carried with her. She is filled with everyone else's soul, but she has no room for her own.
This made me so sad for this woman. She had a little piece of everyone with her, but it did not matter much because she hadn't anything of herself.
This must be what it's like to go through life giving of yourself and not really loving truly.
I feel like this should be ended with some kind of answer. But maybe the answer is just in asking the question. Maybe love is not even realizing that you are loving until you stop and ask. Maybe when you just make cookies for your new neighbor and think nothing of it, you are loving. Maybe picking flowers with your girlfriend because you know she enjoys it is loving. Maybe watching French films and drinking a glass of wine is loving because you are just enjoying life. And maybe not killing the wasp in the room but opening the door so it can go back outside is an action of loving.
Maybe. Or maybe I'm just complicating things.
