Painfully In Love

When you love someone, it is not always going to be smiles and kisses and sunshine. That is the Hollywood bullshit that has been fed to us from the moment we were first placed in front of a Disney film. Real love is messy and painful and hauntingly beautiful. There were times I have been in love and felt elated, and there have been times where I realized I was in love far too late to rectify the faltering I had committed.

This is what I know about the painful kind of love,

When you’re in love you will feel out of your mind because after trying to be logical for so long, you’ll realize that you cannot rationalize this one feeling.

You’ll want to be a better person for them, and you’ll replay every mistake and over-think every flaw you have because you’re clawing at anything that will make you someone they could love again. You’ll scold yourself for not holding them tighter, or kissing them more when you actually had the chance. You’ll find yourself googling the possibility of time travel, and be disappointed that scientists have yet to figure it out.

You’ll walk through stores, your classes, and your life in a daze because when you’re in love you realize that something is always missing when you’re not with that person.

When you’re in love, you’ll find ways of connecting everything to them. You’ll see them in a bottle of wine as you walk through the store because it has a zombie on it, and you know that they loves zombies. You’ll buy it for them even if you’re not sure if they like this type of wine–because you want to show them.

You’ll have to resist the urge to text them every single time something makes you laugh, and every time something makes you frown. You’ll have to remind yourself that maybe they’re already laughing at something funnier. Maybe they’re crying at something even sadder. You’ll cringe when your friends bring up their name, but silently hope they’ll say it again because their name is the most beautiful sound you have ever heard.

When you’re in love, and it hurts, you’ll find that it is hard to eat or even sleep.  You’ll find that it is hard to focus on anything but the hope that things could one day be different. You’ll scold yourself for knowing that this isn’t healthy, that this intense feeling of selflessness is not conducive to making yourself happy in the end.

When you love someone, you’ll find yourself crying when you stumble across memories of you together. Whether it’s in a picture, or a song, or a place that you used to claim as, “ours.” Memories always have a way of being perfectly recalled during times when you wish you could bury them so deep they are dissolved by the magma center of Earth.

You’ll be willing to wait months, maybe even years, for them to come back to you in the way that you achingly hope that they do. You’ll be willing to be in their life in any stupid capacity you can, even if it’s only on the sidelines. Because when you’re in love, it doesn’t matter that they love you back. It doesn’t matter if they’re happily in the arms of someone else. Because when you love someone, you’re willing to be in pain just to know that they’re falling asleep with a smile on their face.