What It Means To Love
The Lovers, Christina Mokwa + Katherine Alt (2025)
Digital collage
What It Means to Love
(in 500 Words or Less)
To love is to forfeit the theoretical // to love is to trade the chip on your shoulder for real chips of equal or lesser value // To love is to be consumed, blameless, and faultless — if even for a moment.
To love is to sacrifice understanding on the altar of passion.
To love is to thrust, to give, to the point of exhaustion — and beyond, and beyond, and beyond.
To love is to French the lamb chops for your lover even though you’re vegetarian // to love is buying their favorite Chablis even though you don’t drink // to love is delivering the weekly meal to you mother — to attend the never-ending doctor’s appointments // to love is having coffee with your girlfriend from New York until you’ve laughed, cried, and lost all sense of time — cutting a piece of the pistachio croissant for her, because you know she doesn’t eat enough these days, after that recent loss.
To know love is to divorce yourself from the belief that you’ll know in what predetermined form it must arrive.
To love is buying the fancy coffee, and grinding it before he wakes up.
To know love is to surrender to the choreography to God // to love is melting bodies beyond he and him parts –– all one –– in the blistering, incinerating heat and pressure, all separation gone.
To love is divine cataclysm.
To love means looking at everyone in your life the way you look at children, and dogs, and the moon on your birthday.
To love is to get on bloody knees, to consciously disregard sins as small as pride // to know love is to get your heart broken so many times, it all starts to feel like God // to love is to know your heart will be broken even as you look at them.
To know love is to be indomitable // to love, against all odds, is to be the light that refuses to dim // to love is to cede power in favor of humility.
To know love is not to think in territories.
To love is kissing through the stubble –– treating your lover like a great feast.
To love truly is to both espouse and embody presence // to love is to choose congruency –– in word, in action, and in intent // to love is to forgo absolutes.
To love is to split that last piece of cake, especially when you’d rather have it all to yourself.
Love is the airport pickups, the 3:32 am everything call // love is the warm shoulder on the cold taxi ride, bumper-to-bumper traffic up I-95.
Love is the quiet walk home after the theatre, juicy lips and anticipation hang like fruit, luscious and expectant –– like my grandfather’s fig tree in June. To know love is to tend.
Love is choosing to see life, every day, through the eyes of a newborn.
*Written work by Christina Mokwa – © Christina Mokwa/Mokwa LLC/Mokwa Creative Company
