The Last Toffee Cookie

We only have one word for love, and that’s because we don’t actually need words to express how we feel. Love, after all, is just resting its feelers in the back seat to the way someone’s heart sings a radio tune. Regardless of PB&Js and rainy days and your sister’s poem "Two Brothers" and cinnamons and The Book Thief and running shoes and the boy next door, we still love ‘em. Adore falls short of perfection; like conjures second-graders’ wide eyes; need or want peppers the sentences of the blind who can see.
But it doesn’t matter which permutation of letters we care to fill in for the blank in the sentence, because all you need to do is take a look into my eyes when you offer me a free copy of Amazing Grace or a bag of Reese’s or dibs on Mr. English Class.
You can put whatever sound you like to accompany how I feel, but the truth is, you can’t beat love. The dictionary prefers strong predilection, enthusiasm, or liking for anything, but really, the differences are between rocks and raisins. It’s just a way to hold onto the snaking tendrils that twirl and twine their way from your heart up to your brain and then to your tongue, resting on just the tip for half a second before you catapult them into the air for the other person to digest. When it all boils down to nothing but steam, there’s only one way to ask for marriage, one way to reason a root beet float, one way to say how you approve of a person, and only one way to explain why you grabbed the last toffee cookie. Love is just a way we classify how my sister looks when I hand her back the last toffee cookie, kiss her on the cheek, and make another batch.