Stories, Essays, and Poems.

Love, to Me.

Note from the author:  I had to write this essay for school, but I thought it was pretty powerful, so I put it on here. Read it if you want. Don't if not. Enjoy and Happy Reading <3

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Love is at the center of the universe. Love is the reason we live. It is our love for others, our work, and our dreams that we can do everything we do. Love is the only emotion we can be in. You can't be in hope. You can't be in gratitude, but you can be in love. I think the reason we can be in love is because it is an all-consuming emotion. Love is the thing that sends our physical and mental lives into a whirlwind of bliss. Nothing matters anymore because we are in this blinding, free-falling, state of pure undefined happiness, and the moment you realize you're in love is the moment you realize you're real. I think that love makes you realize that if everything else in the world is a lie, love isn't.

Everyone is able to be in love at some point in their life because it is what allows us to truly live. However, living becomes difficult when we make the choice to choose hate. The more we choose to hate, we begin to hate the people around us. We grow tired of things we were once passionate about. We grow weary of places that once made us smile. Hate— just like love, is an all-consuming emotion. It eats away at everything that once made you you, and leaves no room for hope. Hate clouds our judgment to make decisions based on love and kindness. Family members and friends are a perfect example. If we are— hypothetically, homophobic and someone close to us comes out, what would you do? Would you remove them from your life, because of their preference? Would you hate them in private, but show a false persona to their face? Or would you show them love and respect? This is true love. When you love someone, there is supposed to be nothing but kindness and respect shown. Yes, this can be hard to maintain, as we are all human and we make mistakes. But what matters is what we do after we make that mistake, after we say that bad thing. That is what shows how much you love someone.

Love should be something we all choose, because it takes more effort to hate someone, than it takes to show them kindness or just human-decency. However, love can be made difficult if someone is disrespecting us and our boundaries. In the example of a friend it would be an argument where they used something either traumatic or hurtful from your past, against you. The same thing goes for a romantic partner. If someone hurts you, that doesn't mean they hate you. There could be a number of reasons— most of which have probably nothing to do with you, or something in them is changing, and this is when we are faced with the question almost everyone hates. How am I supposed to let go?

The worst part of love is that sometimes, it fades. It'll get stretched to its very limit and one day, some tug is too strong for it to bear, and it just snaps. When this happens, most people spend almost forever asking themselves whether or not it was truly love. People think love is something that is unbreakable and something that is able to last lifetimes. But I think that real love is a quick glimpse of this huge thing we're all stuck in, called "life". Love, to me, comes in flashes as fast as lightning. Waves, as rocky as the ocean. Flickers, as unstable as a crackling fire. Love, to me, is not something that can last lifetimes, rather it's something that lasts a fraction of a second and is still able to show me one of life's greatest wonders.

Love, to me, is the thing that keeps me up at night waiting for it to happen to me. Love, to me, is the reason I continue living. Love, to me, is my purpose for being. Love, to me, is everything beautiful in the world wrapped into one word.