Love.

Love.
I once had it described to me in the form of elements.

How cliché.

Despite that, I suppose the fact that it still rests in my memory is a testament to not necessarily its veracity, but the potency of its imagery.

I was sitting outside a coffee shop in Pafos, a city on the Greek island of Cyprus. I was young, and missing my girlfriend (now my wife) terribly. The man I was with laughed softly when he realized what my melancholy attitude was in regards too, and as dusk fell, signifying the start of the nightlife in the club city, the sounds of trance music drifted to us on warm winds, and our coffees had at some point been exchanged for wine:

He told me the following.

Love begins as fire.

It burns hot with passion, lust, and desire. This is the conflagration born of the spark spoken of in songs and poems. This is the love of youth. Of swirling dances under sunsets, and words carried on hot breaths in the night.

Ah, for the fire of young love. Now don’t mistake the term “young love” for an assumption of age. All love flows through this crucible. Until it is annealed in the forge of shared experiences into the next stage of love:

Earth.

When lust turns to comfort and words turn to silence. This stage of love is reminiscent of the deep places of the world. The silence we feel in the heart of things, surrounded by noise but isolated in the arms of another. You see this love in coffee shops, restaurants, and tender embraces the world over. Where the passion of fire has not been forgotten, but tempered into a connection between souls, not just bodies.

Earth can be changed, worn down, sculpted by wind and water. All things change, given the passage of time. This isn’t a negative. Though we would hope to stay with the love of earth.

Water.

Far from being the tempestuous and fickle creature sailors and explorers have made it out to be. Water is the next stage of love. It surrounds us, comforts us. It brings us life and sustains it. When a need for someone is no longer a thing desired for or clutched at, but a thing that’s presence is merely: expected.

This is the love of family and friends, unconditional and non-negotiable. You don’t speak to the sea and expect it to answer. You merely listen, and give answer in your own way.

Those are the stages of love. As far as my life experience has taught me. Now you might be asking about the fourth element. Air.

Well air is an entirely different form of love.

Air is ethereal. It is the love of memory, of loss and distance. Whether an unrequited flame, or a love shattered in the forge between fire and earth. Air swirls between and through all other forms of love. It surrounds us in our hearts and souls.

Distance and time are no barriers for air when forced to a wind.

This may sound heartbreaking. But we need the love of air in our lives, as much as we need fire, earth and water. It sets fuel to the love of fire and makes it dance, in the remembrance of old loves, friends and family. It changes earth, eroding the surface until a smooth bowl forms for water to enter.

Air creates and shapes all other forms of love from our shared experiences.

What a thing, to be blessed by the wind in the high places of the world. Bitter with the hints of frost, or warm with the crackle of embers and sand, heralding a new fire in your life.

I remember turning to the man after he explained this to me. We raised our wine glasses and toasted the coming of night.

We toasted to the fires of our lives.
To the earth beneath us.
The water around us.

And to the air above us.

- Andrew Snucins