There’s an Aztec story about the hummingbird, or, the colibrí. The Lord of the Sun, Tonatiuh, watched two young hearts engage in a ballad with each other day after day, as they left offerings of flowers upon a hill. Huitzilin and Xóchitl swore eternal love for each other, the kind of love that lives on beyond Death.
Huitzilin was a soldier, and it wasn’t long before he was called forth to enter the battlefield. He never returned.
Xóchitl, grieving for her lifelong love, returned to the hill where she spent so many days, and asked the Lord of The Sun to reunite the two. He granted her desire.
Xóchitl was suddenly a glowing cempasuchil flower, but Huitzilin was nowhere in sight. Instead, an emerald green colibrí fluttered to the flower, sipping the sweetest nectar–and it tasted like home. It was Huitzilin, reborn.
To feel loved is an undeniable human need. Sometimes this love looks like two friends holding hands, scared out of their minds for an ambiguous future hidden behind a dreary mist. Maybe it’s a hand-made flower bouquet waiting to be delivered, or late-night calls with a friend, weeping over a would-be lover you can’t forget.
It’s not their job to console you, but they do so anyway—and you’d do it for them too without hesitation.
An innate desire, we are designed to search and search until we find the most difficult feeling to define.
I’m not sure if I quite understand what romantic love is, but I can feel that raging fire in my chest, the longing that refuses to be quelled, the need to be in the presence of another soul who makes mine burn brighter than the moon against a velvet sky. We all yearn to be seen and wanted by another person.
Huitzilin and Xóchitl were not obligated to give; the colibrí was not valued by his ability to provide, and the cempasuchil was not valued by her ability to absorb.
Love is relational, not transactional. Too often I find myself walking in a cemetery where people are kissing ghosts, haunted by how they wish to be seen as their authentic human self. We chase after specters and act surprised when they slip through our fingers. We then believe that if we make ourselves more palatable or appease others we’ll suddenly have value in another’s eyes, but I don’t think that’s how love is supposed to work.
When people’s hearts become a good to market, we are subject to exploitation and manipulation, and we become complicit with capitalist structures. It suddenly becomes easy to throw people away when they no longer satisfy us.
Sometimes we need to make a choice that prioritizes our wellbeing. Our needs deserve to be heard, but when we confuse discomfort with harm, we adhere further to individualism. The irony in searching for a spark with another person is that it is long quelled before it’s even given a chance to shine.
Love is transformational. The challenge is accepting the discomfort. Huitzilin and Xóchitl faced Death, but their love, the interdimensional space between them, did not decay into dust. Instead, they took Death by the hand, inviting him into their ballad, allowing Death to transform the two lovers.
They were not forced to distort themselves. They were given the chance to grow.
The most passionate confession of love I’ve witnessed are souls at twilight, taking the chance to acknowledge each other’s flaws, and then choosing to grow.
The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by the late revolutionary bell hooks, transformed the way I understood my elusively intense feelings. Hooks taught me that it’s not acknowledging our flaws that’s the hardest thing to do—it’s acknowledging the ways in which we have been hurt.
Love is vulnerable. Patriarchal structures harm everyone. I see women stripped of their autonomy and men stripped of their ability to feel every waking hour.
The world around me says that femininity is weak, that empathy is only for women—yet at the same time, women are criticized for expressing emotion. Men, including myself, are taught to suppress our feelings, and we believe that our emotional dissonance is resilience against a heartbreaking world. We may not realize it, but when we are incapable of communicating, we compensate by seeking power and control over others: this is how we enable violence against women.
So don’t force the women in your life to appeal to the male gaze and remain quiet. Instead, give them the space to be their whole human self, and maybe we as men can learn what it means to be human too.
We have all become complicit in a play that only has silent roles. Inside every puppet is a screaming person stripped of their flesh, trying to pick up the flailing pieces.
Flawed authenticity has become quite the rare flower.
It’s an understatement to say that being vulnerable is difficult. Shattering your sternum so that the world can peel apart your heart like a rose can be a beautifully dangerous thing to do. We risk bleeding to death, but if we don’t take that risk, we’ll never let that spark ignite.
And the fire that ensues? It doesn’t burn. It nurtures.
Love is a liminal space that only exists through the delicate presence shared between individuals. This is what humans call feelings, and feelings will never have a concrete form.
Love is romantic and platonic. It is a heart beating faster at the slightest touch and it is daydreaming of sitting under a tree with your secrets scattered in the wind. It is passion and pain. I’m pretty sure love is alive.
Is it justified to confine love to the oppressive boundaries of what society labels a romantic relationship? Love deserves to grow beyond our expectations.
So don’t expect your lover to solve your problems. Acknowledge their humanity, just as you should acknowledge your own. Nurture all of your relationships…it has cost me my heart’s left ventricle to learn that communal love is just as strong as the romance we long for.
But I know it’s just high school. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit that I long for romantic love just as much as anyone else. Just remember to look in the mirror and make sure that you still see yourself. Sometimes we turn into vampires without even realizing it.
As the world passes me by, I’ll still be here searching. I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for, but I’ll know when I find it. I’ll be here, waiting for the day you give me “a million kisses underwater as we walk into the ocean waves.”
