When You Finally Find The Love That You Need

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Growing up I always wondered to myself, what is love?

When looking through countless definitions I found things like: showing affection towards another person, or being attached to someone. What I have grown to realize is that love is different for every person.

When I was seventeen I fell in love for the first time. It was exciting and fun. He was the complete opposite of the person who I was at that point in my life. When I was quiet and shy, he was loud and boisterous, while I sat at home on Friday nights watching movies with my best friend, he was getting blackout drunk. He was a year older then me and always kept me on my toes. He made me try new things, he made my life exciting.

What I did not realize was while he pushed me to try new things I started to become a whole new person. I started sneaking out and lying to everyone I knew. I felt like an imposter in my own body. I started losing sight of myself, so caught up in this boy who was no good for me. The more I gave to him, the less I had for myself. In the process of loving someone for the first time I forgot how to love myself. I let the negative things he would say to completely take over my brain.

After we broke up I did not know who I was. Every day I would look in the mirror and wonder where the shy and artistic girl I once was went. I saw all the negative things he said stare back at me. I saw that I was not muscular and how I was too pale. What I did not see was how amazing my lanky legs looked in a dress or how my freckles came out so distinctly when I was in the sun. I craved to love myself and to have someone who would be my best friend.

As I look across the room now, I see someone who is totally different than the first boy I fell in love with. The man I look at now is rare in the world I came from that I actually thought he did not exist. He is tall, and handsome, with the bluest ocean like eyes I have ever seen. When I look at this man I feel something stir inside of myself; I swear, this feeling could move mountains. When I was a little girl I would watch movies and see a man look at the woman he loved with “the look.” The way he would stare at her made it seem as though she was the sun and without it, his life would be dark. I aspired to have that for so many years. Now, I have that. When I am looking out the window or doing my homework I will catch him staring at me and watch as he moves my long brown hair out of my face.

This may just be the love that I have always read about and watched countless movies on. We see each other every day and I miss him every second we are not together. We walk down the streets of Chicago and talk about how amazing it is that we go to college in a city like this. We stay up until five in the morning talking about space, how the world works, what it is going to be like to be parents some day, and how Plato was the greatest philosopher of all time. Bringing each other snacks at random times and going on movie dates is the highlight of our weeks. But nothing beats staying up until six in the morning to watch the sunrise and not wanting to go to sleep because we are too scared to miss each other.

This goofy, athletic, handsome, intelligent man is my absolute best friend in the entire world. I have never worked harder or fought more for anything in my life; and I am the luckiest girl in the world. I feel like I am his sun, and he is mine, and without each other our worlds would be black.