“This is what love is really like,” she said.
She said it’s broken sentences and unfulfilled promises, void of the four-lettered feeling that remains undefined.
And it’s Polaroid pictures, smudged forever with his dirty, indelible fingerprints.
She said it’s unanswered phone calls and unsent messages that never make it to your inbox and blocked seven-digit numbers.
It’s yelling—so much yelling—that sneaks its way onto your pillow at night and seeps into your nightmares until you wake up
screaming, and shaking, and unable to get his malicious words out of your head.
“This is what love is really like,” she said.
She said it doesn’t exist.
She said that love is just heartbreak, and heartbreak is just a symptom of life itself,
and that you cannot expect to define the word “love” without first defining the word “pain” because, of course, my dear, they are synonyms.
Now, I never told her this, but I found love, found it in a dictionary that my heart authored, and it’s nothing like she described.
She described heartbreak, and unrequited feelings, and a fragile, vulnerable heart mercilessly ripped in two.
She didn’t describe love. Not at all.
Because this is what love is really like:
It’s messy handwriting scribbled onto sheets of notebook paper given as gifts, and roses—seven of them—left at your doorstep.
It’s the inability to finish a short-stanza’d poem because every syllable reminds you of him.
And then you get distracted. And then you forget how to read. And then you are wonderfully consumed by the thought of him.
This is what love is really like:
It’s warm hands clutching onto your soul and clinging onto every breath you take. It’s less arguments, less vehemence, and more thinking and more lenience.
It’s, “sleep, you need your rest” and “how do you want your coffee today?” and “take a jacket; it’s cold out.”
It’s wanting to take up next to, and fall asleep beside, and make meals for, and watch television with, and grow and build a life with him.
This is what love is really like:
It’s windy, twisted roads that all lead to one destination, which is the home that you built in his heart.
It’s a four-lettered feeling that remains undefined because there are approximately 1,035,877 words in the English language
and not one of them can even begin to describe his beauty, or the beauty of the feeling that he gives you.
This—
This is what love is really like.