If You Don’t Try, You’ll Never Know

If you don’t take a shot and text me, you’ll never know if I’ll respond, if I’ll say too much or too little, if I’ll be happy or I’ll play it cool or if I’ll pick up the phone and call you because all I needed was a simple ‘hello.’

If you don’t try to ask me out, you’ll never know my favorite food, my favorite movie, my childhood memories and which parent I’m closer to, you’ll never know why I do what I do, who I write about and what inspires me, but more than anything, you’ll never know how coyly I act around you or the way you make me smile and you’ll never know how I see you — how I look at you.

And if my lips don’t say enough, my eyes will. You just have to look at them when they’re looking at you.

If you wait for things to be perfect to take a chance, then you’ll be waiting forever. Sometimes the beauty of trying is that, even if all the odds are against you, it can still turn into something beautiful. The beauty of trying is that it will always give you the answers you could spend your entire life trying to guess.

The beauty of trying is that it makes the complications simple and it makes the confusion clear.

But if you don’t try, you’ll still wake up every day wondering, you’ll still stare at your phone waiting, you’ll still ask yourself questions you’ll never know the answers to. 

Because taking risks is not only part of life, it’s also an essential part of love.

You take a risk to see if you’ll love someone more or less.

You take a risk to see if they are compatible with you.

You take a risk to see if they could make your day a little brighter.

But it has to start with someone trying, it has to start with someone brave enough to say I want to give this a real shot, I want to put my fears aside and see what happens here — see if there is anything there to work with.

And it may not end up being the chance you wished for, but it will bring you closer to love.

And love uses many ways and many people to pull you closer to it, but you have to respond to it and you have to try when it gives you someone you’re curious about and when love gives you a chance — you should always take it.