This Is Love

You’re brought into this world innocent and pure, a being in need of love and protection for the very basis of your survival. Over the years, you learn forms of love through moments when you fall off your bike onto the cold, hard pavement and tearfully walk up the steps to your mother with scratched bleeding knees. Your mother reaches out to you with her warm embrace and carefully bandages you up and in a few days those gashes heal, and before you know it you’re peddling down the street again.

But then as the seasons change, years pass, and you grow older, you meet more people who try to show you their definition of love.

They allure you with promises of love that so smoothly fall from their tongue. They offer it to you in forms of one night stands, extravagant gifts and amassed sweet, sugar-coated words that give you feelings you’ve never had before so you think to yourself, “this must be love.”

Soon you find yourself feeling hopeless and surrounded by an ocean of tears as you sob on the bathroom floor, trying to force air into your lungs when they tell you they’ve been with someone else.

When they tell you they didn’t mean it, you don’t know any differently, so you think to yourself, “this must be love.”

Eventually you are so broken and beat down that the word “love” has lost its meaning like a love letter written but never delivered, so much so that you’ve forgotten its existence.

But then one day, you meet someone who makes you want to try again, someone who tears down those brick walls guarding your heart, the walls you’ve spent so long building. Someone who spends hours making your tears vanish, rather than creating them, someone who loves you without conditions.

We are brought into the world so vulnerable and in need of love. We are swayed to believe many twisted meanings, and sometimes it takes us being at rock bottom to realize that if love causes you to question your very existence, that it is in fact not love at all.

You spend your whole lifetime trying to understand the depths of love, until you realize that love doesn’t have to be complicated, or agreeing to step on a never ending rollercoaster ride of emotions.

It just takes one person that appreciates you, and chooses to put in the effort it takes to truly understand the core of who you are and the depths of your soul. Someone that gives you all the love back that you’ve so selflessly sacrificed to this world.

All it takes is one person that doesn’t cause you to question whether or not this is love, because when you look at them you realize you already know.