Love Someone Like You’re Sixteen Again
Love someone like you’re sixteen again. Anticipate their text messages like a giddy schoolgirl riddled with a crush for the first time. Dance around your room getting ready for your first date. Feel every nerve fire through your body when you share your first kiss. Let the excitement of wanting someone back into your life in all its uncomfortable glory. Bring the sweaty palms and innocent wonder back to every single first.
Love someone like you are learning. Like you haven’t spent years perfecting what to say and how to act and where to touch someone in a way that is going to make them melt (the way it did for so many others). Love someone as though it’s the first time – with your heart pounding and your thoughts racing and your heart stuck in your throat because you’re terrified to say the wrong thing. Love someone nervously, as though it’s going to matter if you lose them.
Love someone with a sense of wonder. Let the feel of their skin reawake you, let their words alter your worldview, let the experience of combining their existence with yours shake the foundation of everything you’ve known. Let yourself grow alongside someone else instead of immediately marking your differences as unbridgeable. Love someone without judgment or reservation, because it feels better to simply let it flow.
Love someone as though you haven’t lost so many others. Love without fear, without memory, without the hesitation that accompanies years of broken hearts and sour endings. Love as though it is what you’ve been waiting your whole life to do and you have finally been given the opportunity. Love someone as though the idea that they might let you down hasn’t even idly crossed your mind.
Love someone without expectation. Without thoughts of is-this-going-to-last-forever and fears that it will all come crashing down. Love with abandon, with recklessness, with the fearlessness you haven’t possessed since you were too young to know any better.
Love someone as though you’re in puppy love. Because it’s the strongest form of love you’ll ever know. 
