we, the love poor.

 “the opposite to poverty is not wealth, it is enough”.

It seems that in the cases of financial, educational and material poverty, that gauntly sunken individuals blur into the disfigured nightmare we like to forget when we wake up from horrific flashes of reality.  It seems that even the ‘fortunate first-world’ cannot escape poverty.  We are love poor.

So, do we smile politely and pretend like we’re not trying to suppress and ignore the hunger pangs of starved love? Or do we demand love, in commanding and tantrum desperation, lest we perish into limp brokenness?  It seems love has been a nourishment we’ve skimped out on.  Reflections from mirrors of self-love and self-loathe provoke that strange lust yet disgust in which we enjoy and despair at our unhealthily thin souls.  We try to make ourselves laugh because laughter equates happiness, and happiness equates abundant satisfaction which stems from love of life, does it not? So we make sick jokes and adore the jealousies that are created from seemingly ‘cool’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘talented’ others – when most of them merely turned their loneliness into song, photo, rude text.  We are rudely awakened by the suicides of those who belonged to any or all of the three categories worthy of jealousy/adoration, but return to the same ideologies of numb and stupid undervalue because we cannot seem to convince ourselves that the unfulfilling is unforfilling enough.

Why would you waste away in loneliness?  What have you to lose in reaching out for love? Why is it so hard to find somebody trustworthy enough to be honest with?  How many times have you been hurt? How many times have you seen others just as/even more hurt?  Hypothetically, if you finally found somebody to love you – to really  love you – would it make up for all the trauma of those previous disappointments? (Most likely, you’d answer ‘yes’ to the hypothetical: why then would you stop searching?)

DON’T YOU REALISED YOU ARE LOVED? AND LOVED SO INCREDIBLY THAT ALL THAT INSECURITY, FEAR, LONELINESS, LOATHING, PATHETIC PRIDE AND SELFISHNESS ARE EVAPORATED IN AN INSTANT BY THE LOVE OF JUST ONE.

You are known.  You are known to just One, who happened to knit your every fibre together.  You are loved as much as a creative artisan loves that masterpiece creation that means a great deal to Him.  You are loved. You are adored. You are thought of and cried over; called to, to dream with; given little things to smile over; purposed for more than what you’re doing now, or could imagine doing.

Honest to Goodness, imagine if you could be looked at with the most honest and unflinching eyes though you wore your most distasteful outfit, having spat out the most disgusting insult you could muster, tattooed in the unwashable permanence of embarrassment and loathing, and still be told “I love you this much.”

Imagine it wasn’t imaginary.

Because the imaginary isn’t enough.

But love is. Enough.

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