love lists

so people keep telling me that i should create a list of things i want to do before i die. it hurts that i feel like i can't do it, that i don't have any goals. for now my goal is to finish reading all about love. each chapter is like taking a deep breath, an inhale until my lungs feel as if they are going to burst and a release that leads to moments of emptiness. i need it but my asthmatic lungs make it laborious. i think i have come up with one thing for my life to do list though, to make a school of love. it sounds like a lame pick-up line out of context but for reals, we seem to have schools for everything else but none to teach how to love. i used to think that love was innate. i was wrong. love is learned. love is an ability, a skill. one like any other that must be practiced.

why does the word love seem so cliche? its name is over-used and it is under-practiced. how can a word be simultaneously constricting and freeing? ever-present and elusive?

goal: use less, practice often

"I, on the other hand, thought all my grown-up attempts to write love poems were mushy and pathetic. Words failed me when I tried to write about love. My thoughts seemed sentimental, silly, and superficial. When writing poetry in my girlhood, I had felt the same confidence I would come to see in my adult life only in male writers. When I first began to write poetry in girlhood, I thought love was the only topic, the most important passion..."