Most of the times, I let my poems do the talking. I am merely a medium for words to come alive. Yet today I choose to tell you, or perhaps even explain, how one of the poems in my book came to be. Several poems I write are based on my emotions yet the concrete details are not always part of my reality. However, “Tangible Gone Abstract” is a poem that I wrote for someone I love. This poem tells a story based on my own reality.
In case you are interested, this poem is on page 206 of my book, Metamorphosis. I will include the verses and interrupt the flow of the poem to narrate the behind the scenes.
You came to me not knowing what love was. You were taught to believe love was all the little things– flowers for Valentine's Day, a special dinner every other weekend, printing pictures to then glue them to your walls. Suddenly, love was a tangible object (maybe even one you could buy with the right actions).
“Tangible Gone Abstract” is based on my first long-term relationship. It is inspired by everyone’s different perception of love. Since I was young, I always romanticized the idea of love and mostly it was because I grew up witnessing beautiful marriages in my family. My boyfriend at the time “didn’t know much about love,” using his own words. He had had experiences that weakened his view of true love and even made him doubt its existence.
All he knew about love are the aspects that are visible, tangible to the human eye. Couples go on dates; boyfriends get flowers to their loved one; couples say “I love you;” couple celebrate anniversaries– yet he lacked the knowledge of what those things meant.
No one taught you about the thought of choosing white roses because they were my favorite, or how we got to know each other a little bit more as we sat on a restaurant's chairs where past lovers once met, or the meaning behind the pictures when the fear of losing your lover makes you keep every memory engraved In your mind, captured in a thin sheet of paper.
To me, all those things that “couples were supposed to do for each other” had an abstract meaning behind them. Every gift could be explained as something only we knew about each other. Every picture in our apartment meant that we wanted to be reminded of what we had built together: this is how our views on love differed. To him, love was tangible yet to me love was everything we could never see: abstract.
I witnessed the night your ideals shattered like a mirror realizing it can no longer reflect reality. You cried as if you had lost everything you knew during your twenty years of life.
Sometimes life’s experiences teach us that what we think we know about certain matters, might not be true after all. He had to go through tough situations that made him question whether love was real. The answer, in my opinion, is that he was looking at the wrong kind of love. Concrete love might never last.
You used to stare blankly at me whenever your definition didn't fit in my world like a lost puzzle piece removed from its box. That day, I promised that I would teach you about love, the true kind.
There were several instances when his definition of love didn’t fit mine. Sometimes he would wonder why I was sad when he had “followed the rules” he knew about love: gifts, flowers, dates. He would seem confused because why wasn’t that enough? But after his world shattered, he realized that he was looking at love from the wrong perspective– maybe not wrong, but not the most honest kind.
Today, months later, I see hope in your eyes with every "I love you." I see a boy who believes in happiness and not the one that comes from pain. Thank you. Thank you for giving me a chance to teach you about the love I knew. Thank you for loving me in abstract ways, ways in which only we know, too intense to be tangible.
After years of dating, he found comfort in reconstructing his view of love. He understood that love was abstract. He no longer feared and doubted love as much as he had before– yet there continued to be instances that would weakened that new interpretation of such an abstract term.
