I know what love is.
It hides under the endless growing space under my bed,
pulsing like a second,                         mechanical heart of mine.
It is my nature to love, although falsely,        at a distance,
in friendship and in Girlhood
loving with scraped-knees, juice sticky on my fingertips,
fingertips worshipping the acnestis
teeth bared against the sun.

I imagine Godhood is no further from             true love
than Tosca and Cavarodossi from
mist-horned, moon-burnt, break-of-dawn, desert-reaching quietude
            and the great madness that pursues lovers (or so I have been told);

but knowledge is not experience as experience is knowledge.
The goblet of water is not filled with water until it overflows
even just by a bit, even if only it is
the turbulent rippling of        movement on the surface
that causes it to                                                          spill.
So do not call me ignorant of love—I bear a near full goblet.
I am just a statue, unloved by any Pygmalion.

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Vanessa Y. Niu is a fifteen-year-old writer and classically trained singer based in New York City. She frequently travels in search of stalactites in different parts of the world and hopes to study English literature at university later in life. She enjoys indulging her interests in philosophy, literature, ancient mythology and history in her spare time, and can be found writing anywhere, on anything, when it comes to her.