To those we love

Love is a deeply rooted part of the human experience. Tender and pleasant like the summer breeze on a warm day and wild and unpredictable as a maelstrom, this duality gives motion to the human soul. This movement of the soul is what gives us reason to live; it is poetic and visceral in its flow, an unstoppable river of emotions beyond any philosophical explanations.

We, humans, are by nature selfish and inward-looking; we get wrapped in our heads with our own needs, wishes and desires and tend to overlook the needs and wants of others. There are seldom any cures to this malady of the human condition, yet there is one. Love for another person, few things in life will force you to open your eyes and see what is in front of you and mindfully take pause and give your time to another.

It is biblical in its way of how love crashes onto you, with all its pummeling force of ardency. The devotion you have for this other person, the infatuating enchantment, is overwhelming yet welcomed.

How does one know when they are in love and not simply lusting for somebody? Where does the fine line in the sand of a need for carnal release meet a more profound requirement for love? It is when one feels the raptures feeling of being uplifted by joy and happiness upon seeing the person you love, in the delicate touch of a hug followed by the release of stress buried deep into the foundations of our being, it’s that shortness of breath and the skip of a heart that signals the amorousness, all and one action beyond our control, nothing that can be perfectly described by words, but is entirely understood by our hearts.

To have that person by your side is, without precedent, a pure feeling of completeness. A jigsaw falling into place, a peg to plug that hole in you that eats you alive and leaves you empty, void of anything. To be separated is torture of an invisible kind, a nightmare where it feels like a thousand small meat hooks are ripping your heart into a savage visage of pain.

Love has its ups and downs, but true love is like a ship on the open sea, a long voyage of calm and tempestuousness. And through it all, it perseveres, through all the extreme violence it gets thrown against it.

Life can be cruel in its meaninglessness, yet the pain of that gets abated when you have someone to share the burdens of life. To love someone is not to simply expect it all to be good times and smooth sailing; it is a complete experience of life, blissful upturns like sharing a glass of wine on a warm night and needing nothing but each other, and anguished downturns of self-doubt and insecurity. It is precisely these tiny moments of bliss and pain that give us the perspective of what we have and what is worth living for; a perfect relationship without “flaws” would be no longer human and grotesquely sterile in its nature.

To those, we love…