Cupid's Folly

Her parents named her Love as a joke between them,

something they whispered to each other on the nights

when they were just too high to care either way,

when loving each other went against all the odds.

The joke was on them that they ended up divorced

and remarried, the step-parents to other kids,

while Love tried to pick up the pieces of a home

that had fallen apart, regrouped, and stuck together

all without having anything to do with her at all.

By the time she was old enough to live on her own,

Love packed her few belongings from between

the two homes that had never really accepted her

and crossed an ocean (or two) just to get away.

London was too expensive while Paris was overrated,

but her heart found a niche (a hope) in Amsterdam

where she could play at her namesake and never

have to apologize for being too much or too little.

But Love had a reckoning with herself

when the men came too close or too fast

and when they lingered with their touches,

as if every single moment was a brand

to lay claim to her skin, her form, her heart.

It wasn't a nightmare, but it was her dream

being smashed into pieces, each crack in the glass

showing her reflection as jagged and malformed.

Most of all, she wanted "herself" to matter,

whatever that meant to her in the now and then,

and each careless caress was just too much to bear.

It was time to leave, to escape, to fly—

and Love packed her things anew,

throwing away the things of lovers past,

like the wilted rose petals and the torn pages

of sonnets they'd written and given her.

If her patron god was indeed Cupid,

then he had left her what he had discarded,

but she was done with living up to her name.

Wherever she decided to go next, it didn't matter—

but she would no longer be an item on the menu

or the muse or the model or the secret between sheets—

just Love, as simple as that, what she had been born to be.

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