Love: the one aspect of life that is utterly beautiful, but intensely terrifying. The feeling of completely losing control over yourself due to someone else is a concept that continues to boggle my mind. The unspoken idea of unrequited love: that you could be in love with someone you were never even in a relationship with is heartbreaking. Love takes a firm grasp on your heart and it takes a brave soul to let it completely consume them. I feel as if it is human nature to put a wall up when it comes to love, sometimes it is easier to approach life with anger and hate rather than lending yourself to vulnerability; leaving yourself naked. Letting someone see your raw self, without the extra bullshit you put forth for everyone else, is beautifully intimate yet horrifying. You might get rejected, and that's going to sting down to the core. You’ll probably begin to question the very pieces that create you as a unique individual. But know that changing for somebody else is simply out of the question. Anyone who asks you to be someone other than yourself is one, not worth your time and two, they don’t really love you because they don’t know who you truly are.

Love has an infinite amount of definitions; everyone has their specific experience whether it be with an object, a person, an artist, etc. I define love as wanting the best for a person in every aspect of life, even if that means you're not in it. Love is just wanting to see them smile, but being there for them when they cry. Love is being able to sit in silence while listening to music, but also being able to have wonderfully wild adventures. Love is being able to accept the other, even with all their flaws that make them who they are.

Within the span of my short seventeen years of life I have been in love once; it was sort of a mess, at least for me. It was the most confusing time of my life where I felt like I was losing everything that made me who I am. My values shifted, not because of him but because I couldn’t comprehend or cope with how I was feeling. I transformed my feeling of love into anger. It was easier to be angry than to actually talk about how I felt. I didn’t know how to be completely there for someone else because I didn’t even know how to be there for myself. Behind this shield of anger all I wanted was for him to be happy and for him to feel like he could always be himself. I want to see him do the very best things in life and achieve every goal that he sets his mind to, and I know that he will with that beautifully intricate mind of his. I don’t how well I let him know this, which is why it is hard to move on and to accept that sometimes love has to dissolve in order to make room in your life for someone or something else. Just because he may not be in my life the way that I want him to be doesn’t mean that I’m not eternally grateful for the role that he played in making me who I am. When someone leaves your life that doesn’t mean that they have to leave your heart.