Love

Ten years ago, I fell in love. Head over heels. He was tall and handsome and broad shouldered. He was musical. He was talented. He was popular. He was perfect. Our first kiss set my body on fire. I had never known anything like it in my whole fifteen years of living.

He wanted to keep our love a secret. Just for a little while, he told me. I was young and impressionable, and nothing seemed wrong about that. Because soon, we weren't a secret. And I was happy. He loved me. I knew it because he told me constantly. We were going to get married. We were going to spend the rest of our lives together.

But that's not what happened. My heart was broken. No, that's far too much of an understatement. My heart was torn from my chest, broken in two, taped back together, and put back in my chest. Just as it was time for the stitches to come out, the wound was torn open again, and my already fragile heart was broken in three. But again, it was patched up and returned to me. I was bruised and battered, and I knew it, but I trusted one more time. And when my heart was torn apart again, I took it back and encased it in stone. I set it back in my chest and stitched the wound up myself because there was no one else to do it for me.

That's what young love did to me. It broke me. And for a long time, I never thought I would be fixed. I thought that stone I had placed in my chest was far too thick to be chiseled through. No adventurer, no matter how courageous, would find the treasure I had buried. It was too deep and there were too many barriers.

And then he came. Unexpectedly. Out of nowhere. He was sweet. He was kind. He was funny. And he looked right past my broken parts. That treasure that I thought I had buried too deep, that I thought might never see the light of day again, that I wasn't even sure was valuable anymore, responded. It broke down the barriers itself. It got out its own chisel and started working at the stone I had spent so much energy maintaining. And before I knew it, my heart was beating again. It was open. Vulnerable. The scars had healed, and I discovered that what I thought had been broken for years was actually whole.

So I trusted. And he trusted back. And we grew in this mutual, tentative trust. Until it was no longer tentative. It was full. It was deep. That fire that burst all over my skin with the first was an enduring ember with the second, warming me continually from the inside out. What was a source of anxiety with the first was a source of comfort and peace with the second. This love was different. The first love was real; but the second love was more than real. It was everything.

And that love continued to grow until it was somehow more than everything. It was all-encompassing in the best of ways. I wasn't stifled by it. I wasn't controlled by it. I was expanded and uplifted and became more than I was.

The best love is synergy. It becomes more than just the sum of its parts. It is unfathomable in its bounty. It is difficult. And it is scary. But it is the most fulfilling thing I could ever have.