A Creature Nesting
By A. Riley
Love’s conformity reels and lingers until dawn; it rots, I think. It is pliable as soon as it is caught on a fishing rod; it is rough and rigid at the beginning. It is sporadic in the river until it is known, until it grows and keeps the cattle eating—until it becomes pattern and cyclic.
I myself am a delicate charmer; someone clip my wings—I am no longer pure, but love does not care about purity or innocence. There is something so innately noble about love, and I do not know how to hold it—properly at least. I know how to reach for it and catch it, but not how to let it go or keep it.
Love is an intangible value that we humans try to cage—to render and manipulate. Tangibility that, by definition, is intangible but is at the tip of our fingertips. It’s bittersweet and aging and at times feels crude and liminal. It is something I reach for before bed and the bird’s song I hear in the morning. It’s a taste I cannot rid myself of. Love adapts because it's tactile. Yes, it is intangible, but it finds a way to stick to your skin and be the honey in your Earl Grey; be the sweet sap of bourbon at the bottom of your glass.
We are the tool, and love is the motion—it has always been this way.
Love, at its core, is a connection. It is hunger and defeat. It adapts. It is an animal that claws itself from the woods. An animal that accidentally cuts itself as it goes on a hunt. An animal that gets bitten by its prey but consumes it nonetheless—it adapts. Love is the relationship you have with the trees and the forgiveness you gave your mother when you were a kid. It is the younger version of yourself trying to escape—the inner child you sit across from at tea with a destined curiosity and wit you have not touched since that age. It is to know someone in such a cavernous and maddened way that the memory renders itself as a scar—even healed, the outline of it is a rough one to trace. Love is an animal we try to cage. It is an imaginary entity we try to tattoo to our skin—brand ourselves with—and pray to a god it is real. It adapts out of necessity and survival because it’s an animal.
We let it wash over us because of its animalistic root—aggressive and ardent. Love turns our thoughts malleable and leaves us in the middle of the moor, in the middle of a memory we try to outrun. It rings true every time irises stare into one another. It rings true in the dream you cannot stop having of them. Love dances with you in the dearest night and kisses you softly as sweet nothings slip from their lips and get caught on your skin like some sticky sap from an oak tree. It is the soft glances between you and a fox, seven beers deep—leaving the pub haphazardly, slurring words in a cherry-coloured sweater a lover gave to you before they daggered your heart.
How do you act on it? What happens when it chokes you at breakfast? Do you stand wistfully or wait for it to manipulate itself into a burden to bear?
Life is strange, and humans are fickle. In the grand scheme of things, we are all ornaments, yet love confines nonetheless.
