It is not until love is lost, that you begin to think in love language, in love speak.

Almost without meaning, plastered on Valentine’s Day paraphernalia, greeting cards, futile pop songs, I love New York…did she love him more than New York? Really?
At what point does a word, does a phrase lose all meaning and become merely a word you say at the appropriate time? Not knowing if you should wait for the other person to say it, or take a chance and say it first. Becoming infatuated with the three word eight letter phrase. Measured in cuts and losses, loves lost, loves gained. It becomes a transaction, an expectation. It becomes a word without meaning, a modus operandi. A mere signifier. The decorous arrangement of differential elements, the messy dialectics of being in love. A massive hug endured from someone you hardly know, while you gasp and struggle over their shoulder.

Once love is gone in a way impossible to reclaim, your thoughts are consumed with love speak. You see teenagers on buses holding hands and groping, new parents in the grocery store buying remarkable amounts of baby wipes in convenient take as you go packages, old people holding hands, middle aged couples, tired of each other and comfortable, university kids in coffee shops, intensely delving into Derrida, ten year olds stealing untested pecks on the cheek, none of these make you cynical, sneering, or mocking; none of these force your ocular displeasure the other way; none of these displays of love are significant. You no longer desire to be like that, no longer yearn for that style of love. Instead, you take short reflective glances with a slight smirk, your thoughts filled with semi-sentimental language licks, and you go back fleetingly to your book about a lonely, disengaged writer, or the completion of a grocery list containing ingredients necessary to keep one adult, and two dogs alive, because that is what there is. Because that is all there ever is. Because that is.

Because if the word means nothing, then nothing is ever lost, is it?