I knew he was about to leave so I ran out there as fast as I could. I still remember the feeling of the dampness on my bare feet as I raced across the wet pavement. I made it just in time. He rolled down the window, and with tears in my eyes, I asked, “Daddy, why are you leaving us?” His answer was, “Because I love your mother, but I’m not in love with her.”

That day marked the time in my childhood when everything stopped making sense. In my eyes, if he really loved her, he would have stayed and tried to work things out. As a child I deduced that he must not have truly loved her, and he must not truly love me. This has caused me to question marriage and love altogether. It is currently a statistic that nearly half of the couples who get married in America will eventually get divorced. Therefore, I cannot help but question whether marriage actually still holds any value and meaning in today’s society. But more importantly, I cannot help but question whether or not love really exists.

This past May I started my own research project: truly exploring the meaning of love. However, a journal for my findings just would not cut it, so I covered my bedroom walls with paper. After you write in a journal, you close it up and shove it under your bed or in your closet. You are not fully immersed in your thoughts, and as a result, they do not become a part of you. Conversely, when you are surrounded by your own words, your own thoughts, you are then able to lose yourself in them. For three months the topic of love was all I thought about, all I talked about, and all I read about. I completely lost myself in my work, or as I like to call it, my art. Through my research I concluded that love means many different things for many different people. Therefore, my father did love my mother, his love for her just did not match my view of love: absolute and over-powering.

I believe that love is one of the most complex entanglements of the human mind. It is one of those tings that just does not make any sense on paper. Yet even though I cannot provide you with a definition of love, I know what it means to me. To me, love is something radical, like walking around stark naked. Love is intoxication to the highest degree or a blank canvas covered with nothing but infinite possibilities. Love is one of those things you have to figure out for yourself. I do not need to know why my father left us. I just need to know that if I were him, I would have stayed and worked things out. I am the kind of person who loves with every ounce of her being, and that is all I need to know. After all, Anais Nin once wrote, “Do not seek the because- in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solution.”