People are always declaring that love sucks, that they don’t want to fall into this seemingly endless pit of despair, that they don’t want to succumb themselves to the sorrow and heart-wrenching pain of ultimately giving the biggest pieces of yourself to someone else. So we guard it, we guard our heart. We keep it safely tucked under a blanket of security, under a persona of denial. It’s safer this way, and that’s true.

But it’s not really love that we’re scared of. We aren’t scared to fall in love, that’s the point. What we are scared of is much greater. We are scared to love, to love with every once of our being and to not be loved back. Unrequited love, that’s something to fear.

Sometimes there is someone else, someone that they chose instead and you lay down your head and night and wonder why it wasn’t you. Why couldn’t they just choose you? And it consumes you long after. Even when the threads tying you to that person slowly begin to fray, it consumes you. And you wonder when it won’t anymore.

Sometimes they aren’t ready to love you. The scars of their past are cut too deep, and your love isn’t the kind of medicine they need. They aren’t ready to open themselves up, to escape the hurt of the one that hurt them.

It becomes a cycle.

The hurt begin to hurt. They begin to see love as an enemy in a war that can’t be won, a war that leaves hearts tattered and strewn into meaningless debris. Suddenly love isn’t love at all, and in the midst of all of this chaos, you begin to realize that you hate love. You’ve attributed it to the ache in your soul and you tear-stained cheeks so many times that it’s meaning has changed completely. It's lost its appeal, and more importantly, its magic.

So the question is: How do we get love back? Not the false loves of our lives who have placed us on this path of rehab. Not them. How do we get the concept of love back?

It’s now that I’ve begun to realize that we conceptualize and simplify love into a single domain of our complex lives: being loved. We forget that it’s a two-way street, a broad construct.

We don’t need the love of a single person to know that it exists. Someday, that’d be a great feat, finding that someone. But for now, while we wait, we still get to love. We can love life and people. We can submerge ourselves into our greatest passions, passions that we have no doubt grown to love.

We can give out love like newspapers on every street corner. We can look up, we can escape the darkness, and we can find a source of light in what we have right now.

We can give it out to those broken souls in just enough time to save them from the shadows they've created. We can give it to those who have more cracks than we do. We can give it out to those who deserve to be loved by someone else.

And when we're finished and we feel as if our hearts have absolutely nothing left, we can give it out to those who really don’t.