All throughout high school, I never let myself love freely. I never allowed myself to open myself up to love. I was rude and I was standoffish. Any love I did receive was taken bitterly. Any love I gave out was always too calculated and never in full, never as much as I knew deep down I wanted to give.
Since coming to college, though, things have changed. I’ve changed, and in one of the best ways I possibly could have. Back in November I told my friend that I wanted to learn to love someone as much as I had learned to love myself because I am in love with the idea of growing to be in love with someone else and growing into a new love for myself.
I just wish that I could be in love. Properly in love. The type of in love that drives you crazy and brings you a peace you never even knew could exist. I want to love someone. I want to wrap my arms around someone at night and I want to kiss them until I make them late for work. I want to write excruciatingly aching love poems and letters with run on sentences about how endlessly in love with them I am. I want to tell them all the cheesy stuff: how I need a map of them because of how often I get lost in their eyes. How they make me feel like the universe is in my heart and like the world is in my hands when I hold them.
Does being in love make the world look different? Would the world be more vibrant or would everything else seem more gray?
I think loving someone desperately is beautiful. I think loving someone with every ember of your soul is the bravest thing you can do. I think painting someone as your whole world is foolish and stupid and so hopelessly romantic.
I want to love someone so much it hurts to breathe without them. I want to love someone so much I damn near lose myself in them. I want to love someone so much I argue and bicker with them over where the cereal goes in the kitchen. I want to love someone so much I beg for them to let me have their babies and I sob when they say not yet. I want to love someone so much, they could have every last square inch of my skin. I want to love someone so much I’d give them every part of me before they even asked.
Does being in love change your perspective on love? Will I apologize to past lovers for lying to them because I have never felt true love until now? Will I pity those who aren’t in love? Will I be one of those people who smiles and says “you’ll find someone someday”? Will I suddenly resent others for never showing me the type of love I am giving out?
I want to love someone so much it hurts. I want to love someone passionately and painfully. I want all the aches and craves. All the desperation and devastation. I want to be completely overwhelmed and feel every last drop of calm. I want the ugliest parts of love so I can love the most beautiful parts even more.
I’d imagine that love is not just big, bright bursts of color, but recognizing the grayness when it isn’t around and still choosing to find beauty in that empty space because you know of its potential. I’d imagine loving me would be not getting my dad’s jokes. Watching me dance to music with my headphones on and joining me anyway. Sticky notes on the mirror, the bedpost, the door.
Do the different types of love feel different from each other? Will my first love at sixteen be different than my first love in adulthood?
Where does love come from? Does it come from me? Does it come from the other person? Does it come from beauty? Does it come from recognizing the other person’s or my own beauty – or does it come from seeing beauty in the world because of the other person or my own beauty?
How much patience does love require? How much time does love have to last?
What would I be willing to do for love, and what would love be willing to do for me?