you don't find love, you create it

For S - may we keep choosing the work, the wonder, and the rocks.

Dear Reader,

I write to report on the news that I have created love in my life. I initially wanted to tell you that I have found love, but truth be told, I am of the opinion that there is nothing to be “found” where love is concerned. Why do we like to say “I found love” as if love is something that exists independently outside us - in the sky, in the soil, in the air - and our task as humans is to grasp it when it comes within reach and never let it go? The language we use to describe love, instead of illuminating the experience, serves only to constrain it with the silly notion that it arrives fully formed, ready-made, off-the-rack, waiting somewhere in the universe for us to stumble upon it.

No, I did not find love, and I am not merely “in” love, as if love were a refreshing river you dip into when you feel like a swim. I have done something better: I have created it with someone. Moment by moment, rock by rock. And the building has been going quite well; we expect the project to take the rest of our lives.

Yet even the word building betrays me, for to build suggests a semblance of control over the creation - a familiarity that can only be felt between creator and create - and love resists control. I don’t create so much as I discover, and so I find myself less an architect of love than a witness to a wonderful mystery that arrives unannounced and resists control. The heart aches for the familiar and it throbs for the uncertain; it wants the comfort of being known and the thrill of being surprised, and to live happily inside this tension is to be in love.

And so love becomes a constant oscillation of recognition and discovery, comfort and disorientation. It is the realization that you can dig forever and still uncover more, and though this endless excavation is confusing and frightening and at times unbearable, it is also the very source of wonder. To know someone deeply only to discover a new fragment of them you did not know they carried is surprising, yes, but also a relief because it means there will always be more to learn, more to exchange, more of yourself to uncover.

Love, then, is a kind of eternal show-and-tell, where you bring your hidden rocks and shells and fragments of memory to the table and say, this is me, and they bring theirs and say, this is for you, and the miracle is not that you will ever fully know each other but that you keep returning, keep offering, keep being astonished at what is given.

Perhaps that is the true mystery of love: that we can stand so near another soul, breathe their air, memorize their gestures, anticipate their silences, and still find ourselves astonished by the distance that remains. A distance that refuses to be crossed and yet makes the effort worthwhile, for there is always another layer, another fragment, another hidden corner of self to be shown or withheld, and the beauty of love is that it does not demand completion, only the continual reaching, the eternal act of almost becoming one.

And love carries us not only across paradox, but across time.

To be in love is to travel backward, into the deepest corners of childhood where the air is bright with naivety and the days are held together by the certainty that everything turns out alright. It is here, once more, where you find the safety blanket of childhood you thought you lost when you grew up. Where mistakes are fixable, and love is unconditional, and someone is there. Always there. And suddenly you are nine again, and you remember how good it feels to be small, to be cared for, to live in a world where mistakes are never fatal because someone is always there to catch you. And they do catch you, and you do fall: blood pouring out into the gravel of bad decisions and mistakes and young, stupid love. When you scrape your knees on the pavement of adulthood, they carry you home.

And yet love also flings you forward into a wisdom you should not be old enough to hold. A wisdom about what matters and what does not, what is worth carrying and what is not, and you feel as though you have stolen a secret from the hands of an older woman who has already lived her life and seen it all, and yet the wisdom feels like it is yours too, because with them you find these tender truths to have been buried inside your soul all along.

And beyond childhood and womanhood, when you believe there could possibly be no other version of yourself to visit, you find another version that is beyond time entirely. In love, you discover yourself anew. She is the self that only love could reveal, the self seen through another’s eyes, the self who realizes she is capable of more than she ever imagined.

For love is creation, yes, a creation coaxed into being with nothing more than the fragile alchemy of attention, the simple but startling act of being seen, being recognized, being believed in. And you find yourself answering that belief not with resistance but with expansion, as though their vision of you were sunlight pulling open the petals of something you did not know you carried.

But love is also discovery - a quiet uncovering of the softness you did not know you were capable of, the tenderness that enters your gestures, the forgiveness that rises not just for them but eventually also for yourself, as though love teaches you daily how to be gentler with your own rough edges.

So what is love if not an act of unbecoming, of being pulled apart and remade? And in all this creating, and building, and discovering, and time traveling, we suddenly find ourselves dwelling in a place of our own making. Not in a house but in a home, one that does not imprison but steadies, that moors us not to routine but to the earth itself, to the pulse of what matters and what does not. And whether we call it a home or a love or simply the aliveness of being beside another, the name is less important than the act, less important than the continuous creation, the forever choosing, the forever placing of rocks.

Here, amongst our rocks, we are reminded, again and again, that in the midst of the clutter and the demands and the rushing hours, there is something that holds, something that keeps us tethered, that this tether is not a chain but a root, binding us not downward but inward, toward the very core of what it means to be alive.

With love always,

Kelsey

This piece of mine was initially published as “The Eternal Act of Almost” in The Open Letters, but in celebration of Valentine’s Day, I decided to go ahead and republish it here for my readers to enjoy as well.

If you’ve been reading along and want to support what I’m building here, buying me a coffee is a wonderful way to do it ☕️

I can be found on Instagram, or on my second Substack publication Not Actually Your Therapist.