Often I fear to love because I don't want to find it unreturned. I do not want to love an image--entirety of soul, mind--and discover that the truth bares ugly fangs instead. So fiction and literature are easy to appreciate and to love, to adore: they return, timelessly, to my hands, only layered with a greater depth of beauty and of complexity on re-examination.

But I learned this year that I am capable of loving so much--that I can love with such intensity that it overpowers my own misery and disillusionment. Of course this means loving another person. But it also means loving, simply, what I am experiencing: the sweet bowing of a violinist's recording, the bright swirls of leaves on a dark rainy autumn day, the strength of my body inhaling into a straining yoga pose. I see flashes of these in my memory and I can feel my own awe, revel, and love.

These moments never return. I cannot re-examine and re-adore. The next day I find the trees have been stripped bare, that my body aches, that awe does not revisit but wrecks and re-wrecks. Too often this pattern has stamped itself into my life: I spend a night reading with my father, and the next afternoon he yells angrily that I have left my books strewn about, that I read too much and clean not enough. A boy whispers into my ear, his voice shivering through my body. And I realize he's only asking me about her, I in the middle of their flirtations.
I speak and my words dissipate into the air. I love and am invisible.

So, I thought, to love is to self-efface. Selfless. Vulnerable, weak, terrible.

But what is more self-affirming than love? What is more fully expressed, with the entirety of one's mind and heart and person, than love? To be able to glimpse the perfect elliptical descent of the leaf--what can be more real, more raw, more dynamic--more evidence of one's livelihood and presence?

What can be more open and genuine? Not divulging one's deepest pain, but expressing the greatest, most transcendent love.

In 2008 I will love more.