Happy Valentine's Day: How Do You Love?

When I wrote this book years ago, I had no idea I was writing about love. I thought I was escaping my upbringing, playing with mortality, and using my imagination to create a life I’ve never known. I grew up with little to no love. I don’t say that for sympathy, this was my reality. Any love given was conditional. As a child, love felt foreign, even unnecessary, and something for the weak. Years of therapy later, I understand that I was taught this. How could I believe in an emotion I had never felt, never witnessed, never seen practiced?

And yet, now, when I reread this book or speak about this work, love is all I see.

At forty-seven, having been in love and having mistaken attachment for love, this is what I know to be true: love is the knowing of oneself and the knowing of another. It is the quiet space between moments and the courage to simply be. Love is tender, beautiful, and sacred. It must be nurtured, honored, and protected. Most of all, love is action. You cannot help but move toward the person or the thing you love, even if you try to resist it. Love is an energy that cannot be duplicated or manipulated, you either feel it or you don’t. We are not meant to understand the why of love, only the who.

Before I ever experienced love, before I knew what it looked like, felt like, or how it was practiced, I wrote a love story. Love exists whether we see it, believe in it, understand it, or not. It was already living in me, waiting to be named.

I walk in blind faith every day. I move through this world knowing exactly what I want without any proof that I will find it. I believe now that this is why I wrote this book. I needed to go beyond my circumstances, beyond what I had been shown, beyond what I could have imagined to know that it exist. For me, love was always the destination.

Tara and Kevin find each other across time without warning or reason. Their love moves through space and years, again and again. Tara is a slave and Kevin turns into a vampire. They meet in both the worst and best moments of their lives, and still, they see one another. Though this is a work of fiction, love remains deeply personal, and everyone will carry their own meaning into these pages.

So I ask you: What is love to you? How do you love? And how do you show up for love when it finds you?