Love hurts. This is true. This is always true. For love, in it’s truest form, is a selfless thing.
It is not, by far, an effortless thing. It needs your time, reverent respect, and your constant attention. It pains you with its beauty, and it skewers you with its sadness; it demands your laughter…and your tears. But without both of these, it is not love. You hurt only because you feel. And nothing worth having ever comes without a fight.
With the warm sunshine and the generous smiles of love, with its beautiful rainbows and bright butterflies, will come the dark nights, and the confusing fogs, that mean you will lose your way. You will stumble, fall, scrape your palms and your knees…and bleeding, get up, and keep following your star. Because love is a thing you cannot help but give, and it is not given because you expect to receive.
Love is lessons you were put on earth to teach. And each of your lessons are handed to whom they were intended to reach. They’re received at the precise moment that person needed them to be, and you will equally take lessons from them. Little pieces of your selves are wrapped and exchanged; tokens that can never be erased, or cancelled out. Given only as selfless gifts - equal students, equal teachers.
The lessons don’t fill or create gaping voids; they don’t make you complete. You have to be whole, and listening, to understand them.
Sometimes, it is only years later that you realise their messages. But when you do, they enhance the world and your soul; and make it shine like you’ve never known. They make you better at loving.
A lifetime ago, it seems, I knew someone who loved beyond measure.
And another who was loved by them. I knew them both very well.
It taught me this: If I smile when you smile, and I hurt because you do…then it is probably because I love you.
Be you friend, family, lover…I will say so, before the day my tongue won’t move. And I will show you so, before my limbs grow too heavy to hold you…or too weak to bring you a rose.
Love is bigger than pride, than honour, than fear… And tomorrow just might be too late.
A musing to get me in the mood for the Leeds Savage Club Writers' Group theme this week - 'Love Hurts'... :)
