(Baby, don’t hurt me, right?)
The delicate flutter of nerves gnawing at your belly on a first date. Sweaty palms, shy smiles, warm skin, soft kisses. Stealing fries from his plate at dinner, laughing when he swats your hand away. Offering the cherry on top of your milkshake as penance (he hates cherries – that’s why you offer).
Quiet whispers at midnight, stolen touches under tables. Inside jokes. Outside ones. Stealing the blankets and pressing your cold nose into his warm neck, smiling against skin. Listening to his ideas as they tumble out from between his lips, clawing their way into existence. Giving input when you can and support in the form of hot tea placed on his desk at 2am when he’s still at the drawing board. You end falling asleep alone that night.
Tears at 3pm when he hasn’t slept in two days and you have three meetings in the next hours. He snaps; you do, too. Making up the old-fashioned way – with tough conversations, hard discussions that build and break down walls simultaneously. Picking out a cat together (he’d rather have a dog, but he knows you’re both too busy for that right now) six months after you move in together (he loves that cat even though he won’t admit it). Planting a vegetable garden that dies in two months and crying at your dad’s funeral that comes too soon.
Perhaps love is all of these things. Perhaps it is none.
Maybe it’s giving the man on the street corner the lunch you had packed for yourself on Tuesday. Maybe it’s putting bird food out for the squirrels and picking up the can on the sidewalk after your evening run. Maybe it’s encouraging someone to drink water or offering your time even though you don’t really have any to spare. Maybe it’s simply existing, giving what you can without expecting anything in return.
Perhaps love is like a god – we may never know who it is, may never see its tangible form or understand it completely.
Perhaps we don’t have to.
Perhaps love is all-consuming, inclusive, and gilded into the fabric of every seam that holds this universe together.
(It is the center of your soul, and his, and theirs. The pillow on your bed and the wind that caresses your hair in Autumn. The light through the leaves when you’ve been lost in the forest so long that you can’t see the trees. It is you on your best days and you on your worst. It is every god that may or may not exist. It is us, and above all, it is inevitable.)
