365 Project: Day 65

Ah, love. *sigh* People toss the word love around like a ship on a stormy sea and I wear it casually around my neck like a shining silver beacon.

Love is difficult to define. There are as many different kinds of love as there are grains of sand on the shore. I would like to say that I am a hopeless romantic. But I'm not. I'd like to say I believe that in the end, love conquers all. But I don't. I'm just not that girl. I'm the girl who looks at a boy with a suspicious sideways glance. I like the idea of love, but I am its harshest critic. I am a cynic to the very core.

We owe so many great songs and poems to love. Perhaps even more so to the loss of love. Only love can inspire you and demolish you in the same moment. It is the most powerful, uncontrollable, and unpredictable of emotions.

Its an amazing thing. When you are in it, love consumes you. Its a glorious fog. It disorients you and you happily lose yourself in it. Through the eyes of love, the world becomes a place of perfection. The object of your desire, though human, is suddenly without flaw or fault. Even the strongest of people can be melted by the disarming smile of a lover. Something as simple as a kiss can send you soaring. There is nothing like the feeling of recognizing your ideal in another. You surrender, smitten.

When its taken away, we mourn the absence of love like no other emotion. You feel the loss from the inside out. Pain wells up from within, spilling out in each salty tear of despair leaving you an empty vessel. Drained. It breaks you and humbles you in a way that nothing else can. It injures you so deeply that you never fully heal. Where love once lived inside of you, there forever remains a wound, a scar, a reminder.

As time passes, somehow, we find ourselves with sudden amnesia. Forgetting how love once betrayed and destroyed us. We muster the courage to take a risk and we willingly and helplessly fall in love again and again. Carelessly, we place our delicate hearts in the hands of someone who can crush it one swift motion.  It is a brave soul who, full of hope, can give themselves to another without reservation or fear.

For me, it all boils down to this. I didn't buy this necklace because I believe in its message. I don't wear it with the hopes that I will someday fall helplessly under the powers of love. Read into it what you will. My reasons, like love, are complicated. I wear it because I doubt it. I wear it because I run from it. I wear it because I want to remember it. I wear it because I don't want to forget how much it can hurt. I wear it because I fear it. I wear it simply because love, in all its chaos, can be a beautiful thing.