Thoughts about Love

They are all talking about a transient obsession called love. We can call it anything, give it definitions but it defines us more than we define it.
I have found myself loveless, so I say to myself sometimes. As if I held it on a string, dozed off and when awoke could only watch it from afar as it drifted high into the empty sky.
But this is not so. I have cast it slowly into my body, and etched it deep into the core of my thoughts and essence.
Some would claim love is a connection, and thus required to flow in two ways. Actively fed by some external oscillator until absolutely consumes the individuals. Others still clinging to the connection of love, might find themselves feeding on each other, until all that remains is a ball of goo that crisps and crumbles when the environment turns arid.
But I claim otherwise, that a connection might form out of love, but it is not the essence. Love is mostly uni-directional, an arm that in some cases is able to grasp another, but in most cases just suspended in the air longing for a nimble flutter.
I look at myself for proof though I continue to doubt it. Is it love? Was it ever? Can there even be love with doubt?
I do not know. That alone runs through me day and night, that alone is certain. I do not know... Yet I feel it to be true! I feel an arm in a sea of milky white, I feel a void where once a bleached shell clammed me. I feel the crisps of my love on my skin, though the stickiness that held it all has long been dried away. I feel not much these days but I do feel that if not love it is, then something bent me around, over and under a ball that Is not there, and I engulf a void that threatens to collapse.
And still they assert that when you water a plant it grows, and if you soil it, it will flourish. But while they water so it will give fruit, I confess to be watering blindly. But then I pride myself: It is I that loves, not them who simply invest!
While they grow themselves a garden I keep watering a wild thing that only grows thorns at me. So why do I do this? "Blind love!" I praise myself. But it is far from the explanation in full. For I see beyond the thorny twines that fence my world. Though I cannot feel it anymore, I can still see and smell the fantastic flame that engulfs the bush on the other side. I can still hear the zest of her laughter when I look away. And many times I judge myself to be upon the mirror of her eyes, and not inside the skeletal frame of a body that will gradually rust and brake with the weakest gust.
So they explain that am a slave to a mirror image, to a love that does not love me back. Even worse, I'm a slave to a memory or a psychological need. But I ask, is a sunflower a slave to the sun? And when she sets, will it die or seek another? It will only bend upon its stem, and wait. For the sun will rise again. It just needs to radiate on other fields as well.
Still, as cute as my words might seem, they do wrong to reality. She is not a lofty sun, and I no sunflower. A poem this is and nothing more. For I hurt her and she me. Words only color the truth in pink, a color hate like the taste of plastic. Give me dirty rags to ware and I will, but not plastic. And rags I ware, and ashamed of it, because I gave only sorrow to the only person I want to fill with warmth.
Eventually I gave you the one thing I knew was truly a gift. You might not believe me, but I was sure of it then as I'm sure of it now, actually you were not there to hear it (not that it mattered), but I gave you my leave.