If I didn’t know better, I would say this is all love.

Photo: The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

Yesterday my best friend arrived and gave me a gift, a textbook he is working on for his counselling course. I didn’t say this to him then, but something in me unfurled with deep joy. To be seen for all that you are, to be seen with time-long affection, to be seen through the pain and the confusion and the mistakes and the flaw. My teachers in love are everywhere, and I am grateful for having eyes that see and for being able to receive these gifts: the love, the textbook, being seen.

—

My husband makes me coffee every morning without fail. I know how to make coffee too. His machine is complicated, but it is not insurmountable. Nothing material in life ever is. I know the weight of the beans to grind, the grinder setting to use, how to pack the ground beans into the thing whose name beats me now, how to fix it in place and let the coffee drip slowly into my blue and cream ceramic cup. I know all these things, just as I know other things, but I also know this.

The coffee I make never tastes as delicious as the coffee he makes. It is because he is a better barista than me, of that I have no doubt, but I suspect it is also because he makes it with whole, full-hearted love.

Every sip of his coffee is delicious, because in it I find the ultimate promise: you can sit back for a while now, beloved.

—

My mother and father have been married for more than 40 years. Time like this is difficult for me to comprehend because I am younger than their marriage. I have not been alive as long as they have been married, and to me, I feel like I have lived a long time, which means they have been married for an even longer time.

I cannot remember my parents saying I love you to each other, but I remember seeing my father rub my mother’s head during one of her headache episodes. I have seen it in the way she cooks for him even though he doesn’t always like her cooking. I have seen it in the way they fight with each other and then laugh at each other and then laugh with each other. I see it in all the pauses, in the breaths taken, in between words, in the long nights and in the longer days they have spent together.

They have been married for longer than I have been alive, and I think to myself that love has existed for even longer than their marriage. Which means this is where it all must have begun. This life, this being.

—

My dog, M, has a spirit of his own. This means he never listens to me. If I tell him to come to me, he runs in the opposite direction. If I tell him to eat his food, he turns his nose and runs away. If I tell him to stop barking now, he barks back at me louder.

When he was younger and I was younger, I interpreted his wilfulness, his constant disobedience, as a lack of love. I struggled to love him and I struggled to love myself with him.

Now I am older and he is older. His will is older and both our hearts are older. When we stare into each other’s eyes, him in defiance and me in exasperation, my face twitches and I break into laughter. He runs up to me and licks me right across my nose.

Now I know. He has always been my mirror. He was telling me that even in my wilfulness, even in my full disobedience, even in my constant conflict with the world, I was worthy of love. I have always been worthy of love.

—

I don’t know what tomorrow brings. I don’t know much about many things anymore. But today, I know this. The air is cool after the last vestiges of rain. The fluffy, wilful dog has set aside his pride and is curled up against my knee. My husband continues to tap away at his computer, his legs gently resting against mine. My home is doused in the orange light of the setting sun.

If I didn’t know better, I would say this is all love. Only love.