every little thing on love

What is love? What were we taught about love growing up? We were inundated with Disney and it’s princes and princesses. Those romantic comedies where one party was waiting to be chosen, and once they were - all felt right in the world. Happily ever after. Falling in love, and securing that love - it meant we were untouchable, didn’t it? Like we had won the keys to something.

A psychic once told me: "Love is messy." I don’t know why those three words: love is messy - stuck with me as hard as they did. I look at our parent’s relationships. Our grandparents. Siblings. Friends. Classmates. Our first crushes. Our first muses, our first loves. Rejection, comparison, jealousy, feelings of inadequacy, and all of those fights that went on and on into midnight. None of these relationships resembled those Disney movies. Was something wrong with me? Was something wrong with them? I always wondered.

Love is real.

Love is triggering. It’s like standing under a bright light in the surgeon’s office and saying, “look at me. I am bruised and flawed and blemished and scarred. But will you have me? All of me?”

We are not perfect, we are not those love stories that we have seen play out on the screen. We are not Disney princes and princesses, but, we are real.

We will meet people, all kinds of people. And we will hold onto them, and they will hold onto us. Some for short periods of time, but some for longer.

Love is remembering. So much of what I love, I have also lost. Isn’t that usually the case? Maybe that’s why so many of us fear it. But that’s the point of telling love stories. I don’t want to forget who I’ve loved.

And I just hope they don’t forget me.

by emily mais