Fucking love. Always love.

Fuck I hate love. I love love. Love, love, love.

Love aches. Love radiates.

Love sailed a thousand ships.

Love gives prose to the poets, words to the song, colour to the artist.

Love can torment and uplift us.

Love,

Love,

Fucking love.

I write this ensnared somewhere deep in the tragic and poetic romanticism of the tumultuous trappings of love. Or at least it feels so. And, yes, it’s ridiculous, melodramatic and utterly absurd. I feel disgustingly romantic. But it is also completely involuntarily. It’s like a speck of gold dust has slipped seamlessly into my blood stream, floated inconspicuously to the heart where it multiplied ferociously and is now being viciously circulated to permeate every parameter of my being. To my infinite frustration and in spite of the very best efforts of those little white blood cells to maintain my immunity, these little specks of love have consumed all in their path, obliterating my defences and rendering my usually chirpy self almost paralytically morose.

Why do we do it? Why do we love? Love is when I try so hard to steel myself against the urge to text you, to forcibly silence my desire to tell you that I admire you, value you, and find you inherently fascinating. Love is when I find my eyes magnetically drawn to you in a room teething with people and feel like I could just talk to you about everything, and it never grow tiresome. Love is when you demonstrate blatant disinterest in me, and yet you still constantly and intrusively interject into the deepest regions of my thought-scape and hold my heart at siege. This love is against all my better judgement. But if you love someone, for fuck's sake, tell them.

And with this love, I am trying valiantly to part. Sometimes we need to get over love. Not love as a whole, not love as a wider and abstract entity, but those dangerous and debilitating loves that have the ability to torment and hurt us to our very raw and inner core like nothing else. I must realise that unrequited love is not necessarily vindictive, although it may feel overwhelmingly so. Cruel though its effect on us may be, love is such that sometimes the person for whom we are willing to move mountains, simply does not return the sentiment. This doesn’t mean they’re inherently horrid, or that we are somehow inadequate. You just don’t love me.

Try to move on while never losing sight of the beauty, hope, joy and wonder that love has the potential to bring. Naturally, it’s easier said than done. You can’t instantly force yourself to stop loving someone. You can tell yourself that they’re not worth worrying about and maintain a face of strength and happiness and indifference and yet be excruciatingly aware, that, deep down, that person is still the epicentre of the shaking fault lines of our broken heart. Sometimes falling out of love happens without us even realising it, and a moment comes when suddenly you realise that they are no longer the be all and end all, they are not flawless, and you can say, “I don’t care so much anymore.”

Love

Little speck of gold dust

Drift us airily among the clouds

Or leaden us down with heavy heart

Beam our hearts with shards of light

Or pierce with broken glass

But love

Always love

“We all want to fall in love. Why? Because that experience makes us feel completely alive. Where every sense is heightened, every emotion is magnified, our everyday reality is shattered and we are flying into the heavens. It may only last a moment, and hour, an afternoon. But that doesn’t diminish its value. Because we are left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives.”

– C.S. Lewis