When love stays something inside of you stops fighting, it lays down its arms, it finally rests. When love stays, your heart stops holding its breath, it lets out all doubt, all confusion, all of the heaviness that surrounded its need to guard and defend and dismiss anything that came close to holding it. When love stays, something quietly whispers from the depths of who you are – “It is okay to be soft now. It is okay.”
When love stays, you start to understand why it had to leave in the first place. Why you had to ache, why past love had to dig caverns inside of your heart in order to make room for the person who would end up filling your soul with light. When love stays, clarity cracks within you — you comprehend the hurt, the loss, the lessons the wrong ones etched along your spine. When love stays, you make peace with all that weathered you, because you see just how it pushed you in the direction of growth, how it pushed you in the direction of the right arms, the right heart, the right soul.
But I know the dark reality of being hurt by the hands that were meant to hold you. I know the fear; for when love stays, at first it is difficult to believe that it has truly chosen you. After all of this time, after all of the damage, something so heavy has suddenly become delicate, has become simple and light. After years of begging, of hoping, of having your needs starved by those who could not give you what you craved, you have found the kind of love that nurtures you. That believes in you.
And I know, I know — it is difficult when every tender part of who you are has been bruised and let down by the ones who never learned how to love you properly. But you must believe in this love the way it believes in you. You must trust it.
Because when love stays, the only way to truly experience it in all of its beauty, is to let it wash over you — is to have confidence in it, is to give it all that you are. When love stays, you have to be loyal to it, you have to show up for it, you have to understand that it is going to be by your side, it is going to fight with you — no matter what. You cannot flee from it. You cannot let your past shrink you into the kind of person who walks away from it in order to refrain from being hurt. You have to plant your feet, you have to stand and face it for all that it is, as terrifying as such an unknown can be. You have to believe, that this time, love is different. That this time, love is right. 
