Love Is Blue

Like the first flicker of the flame, like the pilot light on the stove after the quiet click, so hot it’s barely visible.

Like cool water running over your skin, making you lean your head back as it soaks into your pores, warming you, covering you, drowning you, until you lean forward and take a breath, then fall willingly back again.

Like the summer sky, a brilliant August afternoon, so bright and cloudless you can’t help but take peeks at the sun.

Like fingers, frozen in the winter, desperate for touch, for warm breath, for hands to hold them bring them back to life.

Like birds in flight, like ribbons in young children’s hair, like cartons of berries, ripe and fresh and melting on your tongue.

Love is blue. Sometimes so hot, sometimes so cool. Sometimes familiar and soft, sometimes distant and guarded, like water you can only manage to dip your toes in.

I used to imagine love as red—fiery and passionate and unable to be grasped between your fingertips for fear of burning. I used to think love was yellow—bubbly and loud and never contained, or green like fresh grass between our toes.

But now I understand that love comes in shades, changes with seasons, builds and lessens and grows and rests still beneath the surface of two bodies lying next to one another, sharing the same breath.

Now I know that love is blue—fierce like sapphire, tranquil like the ocean at dawn, wild like waves or calm like sheet glass. Never the same.

Love is the moments between wake and sleep, cool body temperatures that spark flames when eyes open. Love is cloudless sky, full of hope and possibility. Love is water, flowing and continuous and shifting with each breath.

Love is all the things I know and have yet to understand, but when I feel it, both wild and serene in my chest, I know it’s blue. Beautiful and beguiling and blue.