What Is Love? Poem by Zahrin Nazah

What is love?
A sudden flood of oxytocin
spilling from invisible chambers?
A bright spark of dopamine dancing between restless neurons?
They sell it bottled in glass and gold-lit promises;
a billion-dollar emotion.
Is this love?
Or something vaster—
quieter than chemistry,
deeper than synapses firing in the dark?

Is it meticulous as a brain chemical,
precise as a coded response—
or merely a billion-dollar illusion,
packaged, polished,
sold between advertisements and airbrushed dreams?
What is love?

If I must repaint myself for you;
erase the map of who I've been,
fasten false eyelashes to tired eyes,
glue acrylic moons to fragile fingertips,
hide beneath a borrowed wig.
Is that love?
If I must soften my smile lines,
bury them under twin layers of foundation,
blur my blemishes with costly concealer
until my reflection forgets my name.
Is that love?

If I must carve and sculpt
with fillers and peels,
Botox and borrowed youth,
reshape, reduce, augment,
until even my mirror hesitates!
Is that truly love?
If it requires a vanishing name,
if it trembles before the honest mirror,
if it bargains against the breathing body,
if it tightens like thread through tender skin,
if it survives only beneath the lights of a market?

I have walked through that market
with my reflection cupped like fragile love,
felt the restless language of my skin,
Can I love another
while standing at war with my own skin?
Can I offer devotion
when I withhold it from myself?
What is love?
Perhaps love is not
the trimming of edges
nor the sanding down of scars.
Perhaps love is
the brave permission
When I stand naked before the mirror,
and it does not look away from my imperfection.
when I whisper my own name without apology,
when I let my skin remain
unedited, unfiltered, unafraid.

Is that love?
To love this body
before asking it
to be loved by someone else.

So what is love?
Maybe it is not the mask,
not the market,
not the molecule alone.
But the quiet courage
to say,
Here I am.
And stay.