by Monim Wains

Love has a thousand shades from the mellowest yellow to the deepest red. It paints the grey wrinkles of a face onto a canvas, traced with lolling eyes and a lazy smile. Love. Passion and heat, calm warmth, drowning emotion and friendship.

Inside jokes and a decade of moments, threads of memories twisted into a shared now. Knowing the end of their sentence but wanting to hear it anyway.

Love goes underneath it all. Underneath the layers of bright laughs and nonsense jokes. Underneath the orange bursts of colour in life. There, there is the essence of Love. And Love is coloured black.

A brush stroke made of misery, dark nights and crying, huddled in a bundle of panic and fear. Nights when the world seems so alien. When the earth blossoms and teems with joy but you, you sit and cry. Why this fate for my fate? Why so alone, me?

Me too.

When you know that the canvas of colours so bright on your face should really be so blue. When you know that under the summer-fried sun-sighed sparkle-eyed dance of fire and flower and fun – under all of that – is you, blue.

Hey blue, Me too.

That is the essence of Love.

That confident guy with a chest heaved high, all composed and controlled and admired. That’s no friend of yours. That’s no lover – that’s too good – I’m scared of that.

But that cracked pillar of old cement. Bricks meant for a tall wall if only the mortar held just a little tighter. Love knows you could take the weight of the world if only someone squeezed, hugged you together. When you feel like that and hurt like that and hope like that and Love goes

hey, Me too.

On a molehill of old chipped concrete on a pile of crumbled rubble on a mountain of sharp edges. On friends breaking and falling into each other. On that canvas of loss and pain sits, on a life of shared solitude sits, on a throne of vulnerability sits, Love.

Oxygen, when your head feels so high, so buzzed, that you breathe in thunder clouds and clutter your mind with cold, wet snot. Rain hot tears from your eyes for life. Then, on that lone peak falls snow, gentle and soft. Each snowflake imperfect and broken. Each drop a sign that the weather is always bad somewhere.

Snow blankets you. It carpets the floor and rounds each jagged point, lies beautiful on the ground. This cold wet slush, this disorganised sleep-deprived over-revised stressed-alive mess extends its arms, embraces you. On top of that impossible peak so alone and unique

it says, Me too.

Love leaves the towel on the floor. Each spot, each stubbed toe, each broken heart just there. It pulls you close and looks at you. Through you. Through that hard, dry façade you’ve painted on, Love sees that thin, scratched, crumpled paper of a person in you.

Love says, Me too.