"If you love something, set it free. If it's yours, it'll come back. If it doesn't, it was never meant to be."

This is perhaps the most difficult to accept yet most truthful statement that has ever been made. With great love comes great pain, pain that manifests itself in the form of loss. Love is an experience, pain is the price you pay when you fall too hard. A vicious circle? You could say that again.

Loss is perhaps the worst thing we will come to experience on our journeys throughout this lifetime. Death is a form of loss. Some might even say that death is the utmost painful of all losses, the worst thing that anyone will ever experience. I disagree. The worst loss isn't losing the person you love to death. The worst loss is losing the person you love to an outside force, one that doesn't take away their life but rather leaves you both alive with you feeling as though you're actually dead inside. Yet you both keep walking, talking, living. Pretending and moving forward every day as if the pain doesn't sit inside of you like a weight that becomes heavier and heavier to carry every day. At least when you lose someone to death you know that, that person still loves you. You know they didn't leave you because they wanted to. When you lose the person you love with all of your heart and soul but both of you stay alive, that's the greatest loss you will ever experience.

I can't begin to tell you how many times I've heard this quote ringing in my head throughout the last few months. Falling in love and losing that person leaves you with such an emptiness inside, a feeling that, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, changes who you are. Falling in love changes you and feeling such a great loss changes you. Two of the biggest game-changers in life.

What is there to do when you believe that this love wasn't supposed to end? How do you tell yourself to move on when the feelings aren't something you can control? How do you say goodbye to what was once your favorite hello?

Being in love means a lot more than loving someone. Being in love means you see the world differently, it means you breathe your air differently because for the first time in your life, you are breathing for someone else's existence too. Being in love means choosing to go to bed at 2am when you have a test at 8:30am because you can't bare the thought of ending conversation with this person. Being in love means getting up a half hour earlier to surprise your significant other with a lunch you made just for them or with a coffee and sandwich from Dunkin' Donuts exactly the way they like it. Being in love means buying a $1 rose, kit-kats, gatorade, a lottery ticket, and an oatmeal treat cake from the convenience store because you're sorry for the stupid fight you got in the night before. Being in love means being so mad you could scream but staying up with your significant other the entire night as they throw up because it still kills you to see them in any sort of pain. Being in love means sacrifice. It means compromise, solutions, nurturing, believing and above all else, it requires you to let yourself feel what you truly feel in your heart.

If you fell in love, the real deep kind of love that allows you to sit with a person for hours staring at the ocean and talking about the mysteries of life unable to let go of the feel of each others' skin and you lost it, listen to me. You are suffering the greatest loss you will ever suffer. It's OKAY to let yourself feel that suffering. But don't, I repeat don't, for even the smallest instant, don't give up on that love. What you felt was real, regardless of what caused you to have to allow your love to be set free. It was real. If you let it go, I am proud of you. If you let your love be free, I am proud of you. Believe it or not, that wasn't the hardest part. This next part is... Believe. Believe that it was yours, believe that love was everything you ever felt it was. Know that your love will come back to you. No one knows when... It could be tomorrow, next week, next year, seven years from now or it could be in our next lifetime. Keep believing.

Set free what you must in life. Even love is something we cannot always hold onto. But it's real. Trust your feelings, trust your instinct and believe. Sometimes the ability to believe is the last thing we have to hold onto in this world...

P.S. That spark you feel, that's real too. Don't ever let anyone tell you otherwise.