Falling In Love

Together

Falling In Love

I’m not sure how it happens or why it happens, but it happens.

Someone drifts into your life, sometimes like a soft summer breeze breathing fresh air into your thoughts, sometimes like an distant star exploding into dusty energy that finds its way into your heart.

Someone appears when you least expect it, and that person touches some part of you, not the part that is waiting for love, not the loneliness inside you, not the longing you have for another’s touch, but something ... something that causes a curious turn of the head, something that catches you looking twice, looking back, looking with different eyes at a world you thought you knew, understood, had pinned down. It can happen on a warm summer’s drive or walking down a cold city street, at the most expensive restaurant or across a creaky kitchen table, in the pale light of morning's waking or in the darkest passion of the night. In that single moment, you feel lost, found, awake, unconscious, frightened, confident, and above all else, transformed.

The world changes. The world you thought you knew melts down before your eyes like a lazy candle flickering by an open window, and what you thought you knew best about your life becomes what you no longer really know at all. At first, you fight it, question it, laugh at yourself, consider and reconsider the surge of simple joy that seems to rise from within you. You walk through your daily life, but it’s a different journey now. Someone else walks with you, inside you, and in any unexpected moment you remember the smile, the sound of a voice, the gentle look of special eyes. You glow, you say silly things, you find yourself smiling uncontrollably, you turn to music, you imagine poetry, you drift into moments of restlessness. You become more than what you were. You grow ... your thoughts expand, multiply or divide ... who can say what the right word is?

Some say love completes you. I say love breaks you apart, crashes and smashes you into a jigsaw of emotions that you will never understand, throws you in pieces across a rocky beach, creates a puzzle so complicated and so baffling that you feel helplessly confused in the knowing that you can no longer feel whole again away from that other hand that touches your hand, separate from the lips that brush your lips, apart from the heart that beats in steady harmony with your heart.

Love is never the dreamy pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof. Love comes like a hurricane sweeping through your thoughts with a fury and ruthless abandon so great that it destroys every memory of every romance that ever came before. Anything less is unacceptable. Anything less leaves traces of doubt, an unrelenting question that drops from somewhere in your thoughts and leaves you looking back, leaves you reconsidering distant echoes of your past. Love knows no past, only the present, and a glimpse at the future.

Love is never a compromise, never a surrender of who you are, never an acquiescence with the distant starlight of your highest expectations, never a settling of differences with a promise that suits you now but will infuriate you later. No, love is the unconditional commitment never to compromise again, never to settle for anything less than undefined rapture. It is a contract you make to explore the wilderness of the unknown. If you look for the fine print, then you've already lost your way. There is no certainty that you will survive the journey. There is no warranty on parts and labour, no guarantee that love will last beyond the next corner. Love is accepting every risk, every warning, every obvious failure around you, and then blindly signing your name on another person’s soul. Love may dissipate in a twinkling of a star or last forever. If you can't risk the uncertainty, step off the road.

Above all else, love is never anything less than discovering the wonder of life. Love is a ticket into the most spectacular show on earth. Through every thrill and every spill, love steadies a spotlight on what you never imagined was possible. It connects you to another and to another world. It carries you forward across the tightrope wire, where you step smoothly through every anticipation of disaster until, finally, you realise that the twists, the turns, the death spirals of emotion lead not to catastrophe, but to the safety net of another waiting, constant heart. The price of admission is great — everything that you are — but through every act, you will find yourself eager, breathless, hopelessly happy, and unable to know who you were or even who you are, because you are no longer one, alone and apart.

You have become one of two.

Falling in love . . . so unpredictable, so unsettling, so utterly frightening . . . and so wonderful.