Love is hard and stupid.
There is no eloquent way to phrase it. Love exposes your deepest wants and needs–and yes, we do need. We need human touch. We need to be loved. We are a collective species. But when we love we risk hurting others and being hurt ourselves. It makes no logical sense. It is, as the Vulcans say, illogical.
But it is also inevitable. And beautiful. It is a waterfall at sunrise, the rush of water and mist and rays of a new day sun warming the skin, wrapping you in a cloak of sensation that only comes from this moment. It is belonging. It is feeling safe and needed. It is purpose itself.
And it is foolish and deadly. More people die from a broken heart than perhaps any other affliction ever created by God or man. Perhaps ‘Broken heart’ never finds its way to the medical report or tombstone, but the cause is the same. In the absence of love we are shells and automatons performing the mechanisms of daily life.
I have been in love my entire life, each drum beat of love stronger than the last; a heart being born and made stronger by affection. I am in love now and it carries me forward on a wave that crests and falls and rises again like that heartbeat that first brought me into the world and will in time carry me away from it. I love, I grow, I hurt, I love again. I share this cycle with a single woman and she with me. Together we feel these things. We love each other. We grow together. We hurt each other without meaning to.
In the end our love carries us forward. It is beautiful and dangerous and illogical and stupid and everything wonderful about life.