Don’t Stop Fighting For The People You Love

I miss fighting for people. I want to meet someone, and take a leap of faith, and fall in love. I want to love someone with all my heart, and not feel the need to apologize for it. I want us to lock stares across a room, meet in the middle, and say we’ve found it.

I’m saying this because for the first time in my life, I’m holding on. I am in one country, currently studying abroad, and he is on the other side of the world. When I go home, we won’t be living side-by-side. We will still be on opposite sides of the country, albeit that at least this time it’s the same country. So many people think it’s strange that I want to fight for someone who I can in no logical way be with. But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try.

Back in the time before Facebook and Twitter and dating sites, when you met someone you cared about, you held on. You didn’t wait around to see what might happen. You didn’t stand there weighing your options. You went for it. Because it was raw and real and true. You wrote love letters every day when you were apart, because when you could not speak the words to them with your lips, you spoke them on paper. You sat there while separated at a distance, not looking for other options, but keeping yourself busy until they came back to you.

I want to scream it out to the world that we give up too easily. That if we saw people as a priority and not as an option, we would all be amazed with what the human race contains. With what the world contains. I want to love until my body aches with happiness and my mouth hurts from laughing. I want to have smile lines on my cheeks when I grow old. I want to live in a world where we trust our feelings more than we trust an app to bring us our next great love.

I want to feel overwhelmed by the sensation of love and not run from it. I want to face it head-on. I want to stand outside someone’s door shouting their name, until they let me in so I can tell them I never want to live another day if it isn’t with that person. I want to wake up in the middle of the night to someone throwing rocks at my window. I don’t want to walk away thinking it will be so simple to find another person to feel this way about.

He is on one side of the world. I am on the other. Sometimes I miss him so much it’s like I can’t breathe. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just walk away, because with things like Tinder and all other forms of social media, it’s all too easy to tell yourself to forget. But something in me knows that what he and I have doesn’t happen every day. It’s just a feeling, but it’s enough to make me believe that this is something special.

Last night I wrote him a letter. Tomorrow I am going to put it in the mail. Because this time, I’m not giving up so easily.