Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Love Love Lovely

"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love." - Sophocles

"We love because it's the only true adventure." - Nikki Giovanni

"Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it, and it darts away." - Dorothy Parker

"Love is friendship set on fire." - unknown

***"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." - Erica Jong*** (I love this one.)

"Maybe love is like luck. You have to go all the way to find it." - Robert Mitchum

"Loves makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." - Zora Neale Hurston

"Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." - Mark Twain

"Love is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day." - Nicholas Sparks

"To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." - Karen Sunde


And reading these, do you remember love?
Do you remember the butterflies in your stomach?
Seeing them, calling them, that first kiss.
Not even romantic love, just the love that it's possible to share for another person. I was pulling pictures off my wall the other day. There's me and Katie, smiling, sitting on her car when we were 16. There's me and Danny in his car on our last day of summer. There's me and Emily, on our road trip to Glenwood Springs. Your best friend, you mom, someone, anyone. There's enough to go around.
My first memory of perfect love remains a picture of a summer afternoon spent in a park, laying in the grass looking up into the trees. I took a picture then, I've posted it before. It's perfect. We held hands, our bodies not touching as we soaked up the sunshine, wasting a perfect weekend afternoon with each other. I thought then that this was something special, I had no idea where it would lead. I shifted, laying my head on his stomach, in a that questioning tense first touch. Now, I slip my hand into his and know that it's normal. It feels like home.
Too often, I think, we forget the little things that made us fall in love. The glint in his eyes when he looks at me, the way he makes me laugh, the long drives that we do early in the morning, it's these things that make me think that sometimes we let everything else get in the way of feelings.
Tonight, everything got the better of me, and for the fifth time in as many days, I found myself sniffling into the phone, in a foul mood, trying to pick a fight with him just to make myself feel better. And for the fifth time in five days, he came to my rescue, making me laugh, not letting me fight with him, not letting me think about what was wrong. He makes it better. He doesn't understand, he tells me that, but he tells me that no matter what, he'll listen to me and be there for me. He sympathizes, and sometimes that's enough. He talks to me until I'm calmer, until everything has fallen back into place. He does the cute things that have become the things we share between us. He gets to love me more today, so I let him, even though he doesn't. He couldn't.
So tell someone you love that you really love them.
Do it, and remember when you fell in love.
And save that feeling. It's that one that you just can't bottle up. You just have to try to keep it and hope it will never end.
Good luck.

oh and p.s. here it is....my favorite memory of the day I realized I loved him.

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