Writing about writing about love

SmallStack's Guest Post series #3

We’re back with our third Guest Post. And you know what that means… Our community loves keeping it Small(Stack)! To read or reread our June contributors to the series, read Amanda B. Hinton’s kind words to herself as a new writer with a tiny audience, and discover why Sarah Teresa Cook believes in their heart that small is where all the best connections are made. 

Want to write a Guest Post for SmallStack? Then visit our Guest Post page to learn more about the process and submit your pitch! Guest Posts are a great way for our community to engage in conversations about things we value, questions we have for ourselves and others, and ideas about how to be great at staying small or growing bigger.

We started Guest Posts to showcase the incredible variety of creative voices in the SmallStack community, and we intentionally seek out all kinds of artistic mediums — not just written articles. On that note, today’s Guest Post is something extra special: poetry!

Maia Brown-Jackson

pitched us to write a new poem just for us on why we all write about love. SmallStack welcomes her poetic gift!

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Writing about writing about love

by

Maia Brown-Jackson

It’s 3:07 AM and I still can’t sleep.
Disoriented and inarticulate but still
passing the time tangling and untangling words on the page
and isn’t there something strange
in how often love sneaks itself into verse after verse
without my leave?

In your work, too, I’d imagine.
(I’ve been told as fact.)

So let us get meta as fuck on this sleepless night
while the cartwheeling thoughts amble their way
into something more directed, more focused.
Let us ask: why do we all write about love?

Is there something in us that can’t stand unanswered questions,
can’t not write about something that we don't seem able to precisely
categorize,
classify,
or move on from
when we’re done?
Because, pages and pages later, we’re still not done?

Photo by Maia Brown-Jackson

And when we’re not writing,
how often are we just sitting, pondering,
alone or in conversation and maybe sober and maybe not
so maybe you won’t even remember
that you were wondering what this thing is that people say
makes the world go ’round,
makes you crazy,
is the reason you’re alive,
and you’re considering and maybe talking
and you realize you don’t really know?
(And if you remember anything, it’s that.)

You know pieces of it.
You can talk around it,
about the metaphors it inspires in you,
about the other feelings it ignites in you,
when you love
love
love
and it’s kind of extraordinary, all these words,
these possibilities and questions and actions and results you can ascribe to it—
all that from just one word?
Yet despite all that it remains abstruse?

After all, we write the sensations,
all veins electric and heart seeking defibrillation or maybe arrest,
swallowing unconsciously,
then breath slinks out like marijuana smoke,
billowing down heavy and rankly sweet;
we write the weight of a dozen dozen maybes,
a hundred hundred more regretted nos,
a thousand thousand what-ifs and if-onlys and I-wishes:
so can we help but inquire into the inevitable disasters
and uncaring, unflinching what-the-hells?

We write desire, certainly,
and love is desire.
Not merely wanton or debauched or pliant-submissive-accepting,
just: desire. Just I want and I want more and I want again.

I want you and I want it and I want that and I want more.

Yes I want—
I want—
want—
yes

If love is yes,
what the hell does that mean?
You think we, the ones who write,
the ones who brood over synonym and meter, will not
obsessively interrogate something as grand, as vague, as yes?

Photo by Maia Brown-Jackson

We’re already writers, you think we back down from a challenge?
If there’s this word/feeling/passion/compulsion/thing
to which no mere dictionary has ever done justice,
that no combination of words seem to get quite right,
as you realize again you keep writing about the physicality
and the side effects
and the aftermath,
not just love unattached,
and you might not even notice because you’re a writer
and you’ve heard “show, don’t tell” your entire life
and isn’t that what you’re doing,
how could you concede defeat?
How could we not attempt something that can never be conquered,
but it’s always there,
fundamental to—well, everything?

We write adrenaline seeking out every capillary ’til
skin cells are vibrating at a frequency too high for the eye to see.
Neurons firing and searching for the unmapped pathways.
A punch to the gut, a collapsing of the lungs, flesh splitting open
so it can dig its claws into exposed nerves,
rich and real and painful as staring at the sun.

Fingers are flying now across the keyboard, lost under the influence of inspiration
and god is that a fantastic feeling
and in that instant you exist and it’s good because the words are coming
and do you even know what you’re writing anymore?

No, we just exhale words like the automatic, unthinking action of sucking in oxygen,
accepting the fate of being an aerobic organism and then instead saying,
fuck it, I’ll build myself an artificial lung and go to space,
when we try to write love.

The obvious start: love is sex.
Butterfly fingertip trails, muscles jump and breaths hitch—
bruising biting blinding
and nothing but blind-deaf-dumb feel want need.

The obvious counterpoint: love has never been about sex.
Love means connection and understanding.
It’s not being able to say goodbye while still running as fast as you can,
afraid of this thing that’s growing inside you without your permission.
It’s staying up far too late
because there’s an honesty in those exhausted, dimly lit hours,
private just between you and this person or these people you love,
something sacrosanct in the words whispered in the dark.

Love is finally feeling safe enough with someone else that you can get angry
and yell
and hate
because you know they won’t leave you.

Love is loneliness.
Feelings spilling out like blood from a slashed carotid artery
except when every last drop has gone and dried on the floor
the emptiness somehow didn’t kill you.
All that bullshit and all those defenses that you hoped weren’t needed,
not anymore and not again and you’re tired because
you let yourself hope dammit—
you have to rebuild because you’re alone again or still or both.
And in a world of billions it’s terrifyingly easy to fade away unnoticed.

Love is connection in the anonymity of city streets.
It’s the intimacy of knowing someone so well, so deeply,
that you can say just one word
and suddenly you’re both laughing,
hysterically,
until your stomachs ache and you choke for air.
It’s green summer days and butter-slick-sweat from sunshine
and numb-finger-frozen-eyelash cold
and drinking right up to near-death and then just one more
because you’re together, and you cherish each other like nothing else,
and you had a one in ten-thousand chance of meeting but you did
and that can almost make you believe in something.

Love is existing and surviving and then one day waking up to realize,
there is so much more to life than just living, and
I want to feel all of it.
I want—hell, it’s okay, love means it’s okay to say just that:
I want.
To say, I’m ordinary but I feel something new.
To say, I’m scared but I believe it will be worth it.
To say, I feel I might be good enough.

Shit, for once I feel.

Wait.

I’m sorry, I got a bit sidetracked.
I had a question, right?
Why do we all write about love?

Well, maybe writing is love,
a subset, a creation you offer to the world,
all vulnerable or possibly proud or probably both.
Maybe not for everyone, but for me, at least.
And probably, if you’re a writer, for you, too, some of the time.

Maybe we write about love because writing lets us explore.
Because as you write, just write and write and write and don’t stop
you discover that you actually are thinking something so raw
that you can’t believe it was inside of you,
not seared and cauterized by the heat of your body,
and that your truth is wildly different by the time you’ve finished
(do you ever really finish?)
and what you’ve written is entirely too personal to let another soul see it now—
except maybe them—
so you wrap it tightly around a single rib and hope you don’t trip and break it open
like you have so many times before.

Maybe the question is
why do we need to understand every element and angle and facet?
Because we haven’t stopped writing about it yet, not for millennia,
and writing helps us uncover the truth, and yet no one has,
but we’re still trying,
so why?
Are we afraid of its power?
Or, possibly, are we afraid
that if we can’t put it succinctly into words it might not exist?

Photo by Maia Brown-Jackson

There are those who say love isn’t “real,” it’s just chemical reactions.
That it’s not some sacred, hallowed thing
that just happens to be so complex, so elusive, that we don’t have the language yet.
That it’s not somehow divine
and simply evading our attempts to simplify it into a few choice words,
a short phrase,
or even a full sentence if need be.
Well, what if it really is just an evolutionary trait,
insidiously forcing us to bond and mate so the species survives?

So maybe the question is:
(because love is just question question question and the answer could be everything):
does it matter?

Does it truly matter if it’s “real” or if it’s pheromones
causing your brain to react in a certain way
to give you all of this?
Do we have to know?
We get to experience something this beautiful, this devastating, this much,
and we feel it spreading throughout our bodies,
and already, every molecule is just reacting to chemicals in our brains
as we move through this world,
so why can’t love, too, travel via veins and arteries because
it seems like it must be in the oxygen and carbon dioxide
filling and emptying our lungs?
Does it change the electric, catastrophic charge we get from love
to something more if it came from somewhere, something else?

Mightn’t it even be more precious,
more incredibly rare in this ruinous,
this fatal world,
if it’s something that comes from within us?
I mean, I certainly don’t have the answers.
But mightn’t that be rather marvelous?

Maia Brown-Jackson is always happy to say hi and talk any and all aspects of writing, things that don’t make sense about society, how cool Deadpool is, why no one should feel embarrassed about liking Taylor Swift, favorite surrealist painters, or just share videos of baby goats in pajamas (and her insomnia means she is available at some odd hours). Hell, she joined Substack because she wanted to expand her literary community and was so thrilled that SmallStack was created and can provide the opportunity to discover new and diverse content and audience.

From the growing SmallStack Team, we’re sending out a great big THANK YOU to Maia for dedicating her creative energy to the love of writing about love. If you enjoyed this guest post, please tell us about it in the comments!

And if this has sparked an interest in submitting a Guest Post pitch to us, please visit the Guest Post page for more information. We absolutely want to hear from you!

“Writing helps us uncover the truth,”

Robin, Robin, & the SmallStack Team