All the Doors Are Singing Love Songs at Once

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We would all like to believe that love is a room, bright as a citrus grove, filled with ceiling fans that spin all our old sadnesses into harmless confetti, a room where every window opens to some larger possibility like mountains folded with snow, or an ocean that calls us by our actual names, not the ones our families yelled in anger, not the ones we wrote on applications to look respectable, but the names we whisper into pillows when we are most alone, the names that bloom in us like secret orchards, the names only our lovers, if they are brave enough, get to know.

We would all like to believe that love is a room, a room with twenty mirrors so each angle of the self is adored, even the back of the neck, even the parts that smell of onion and shame.

We would all like to believe that love is a room, a home that will finally make sense of the body, this body always too much or too little, this body that wants to sleep through winter and wake in July, this body that swells with unanswered questions, that wants a country where no one is told to leave.

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But when we have loved enough, when we have been loved enough, we discover that love is not the room but the shimmering door we stepped through while carrying our duffel bags full of need, our backpacks rattling with fear, our plastic shopping bags crinkling with emptiness, and inside we tried to build something palatial, something cathedral-sized, but the scaffolding was always the wrong color, the rooms smelled faintly of our childhood bedrooms where we taped pop stars to the walls because we could not yet name the loneliness that lived inside us like a careful landlord.

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At best the beauty we made in the name of love became a shape-shifter, became a candle that melted and remelted, became something we could point at during dinner parties and say remember when we thought that was enough. Or maybe it drifted into the ocean of our routines, sank with all the coffee grounds and grocery receipts. Or maybe the beauty stormed out, slammed the cabinets, took the photographs, the sweaters, the favorite playlist, left us with fog, left us with dishes unwashed, with poems that refused to finish, with lessons too bitter to swallow and yet we swallowed them, gagging.

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When we have loved enough, when we have been loved enough, we find more doors more doors sighing open ahead of us, more doors shutting behind us with the finality of slammed textbooks, and we realize love is not a room but a threshold, not stability but metamorphosis, not safety but the ongoing invitation to risk again, to risk louder.

A door, you sigh, remembering the first time you felt infinite as if boundaries were only myths our teachers invented, as if loneliness could be dismantled like scaffolding after the building is complete.

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A door, you laugh, already sketching in your mind the new room where even the ceiling will sing, and maybe you will name the smoke curling upward after the friend who saved your life, maybe you will look at the windows and see all your ancestors waving, saying this is how we keep walking, this is how we make love a country worth living in.