What if it does?

               You can never be free from love. It traces your footsteps to your childhood home and ruins all your secret hiding spots. It curls up in your favorite blanket and crumbles your solace when that break-up was just too much. Love trails behind you as your feet drag over a well-worn walking path in the woods where you only took the most worthy. Love cracks the peace of everyday life in the sticks, where everyone knows what happened the night before and every night since.

               And yet, we crave it. We need love like we need nothing else. It gives a fullness that neither food nor knowledge can provide. While one fills the requirement for the nourishment of the body and the other for the mind, both are still found to be lacking.

Love fills up your soul. It gives you a pressure in your chest, causing all sorts of havoc. It pushes you to tell all your secrets and rips your chest open, your innermost self entirely exposed. Love is foolish that way. It is such a desperate need that all else is tossed aside to make room.

Love is dangerous. To share yourself with another person, completely… it’s daunting. It’s humiliating when you aren’t smart about with whom you share. Love makes you callous after that. Guarded. Hurt. Maybe even a little selfish. After sharing once, and seeing the world crash all around, why do it again? Surely, it would stand to reason that after such tragedy, one would stop trying to love.

But it comes back. When you don’t expect it and definitely when you start to not want it. It comes back like a whipped puppy dog, begging you to try again and take it all back. Start over. Breathe. Redo. Love is foolish. But I want it. I need it. I have it.

“It is a risk to love. What if it doesn’t work out? Ahh, but what if it does?”