When you first start dating no one will guide you in the right direction. You’re on your own traveling down winding roads with no roadmap or GPS. Sometimes you’ll be lost and sometimes you'll be heading in the right direction, but quickly you learn these roads will take you places you never knew existed. Then one day the road will bear one direction and a centripetal force will guide into those unsettled lands. No matter how hard you try to fight this force, it will take utter control of your feelings and emotions. It sucks you into its grasp and bestows a feeling within you that can't be described. A feeling that human beings yearn for from the day they are born until the day they die. A feeling that will drive a human being into doings acts they never thought possible; acts of nobility or acts of ignominy. It's the feeling described by one simply complex word, love.
Once you fall in love, that love becomes a wild animal that can't be domesticated. Love will scream from you like a lion's roar, it’ll be fierce and significant. It’ll be as big as the king of the pride, but as small as a newborn cub. It’ll make you protect that love blindly anytime it’s under attack. It’ll make you express that love like never before. Most of all, it’ll make you support your loved one no matter what, through thick and thin. That love becomes your life, it becomes part of who you are as person. It makes you feel whole; it makes you feel alive.
“How could I ever have known before you, there was such a thing as falling without landing.”
– Lennox D Jones.
At first the road of love is as straight as an arrow. It guides you through beautiful hot summer days filled with the sense of living. The suns rays glimmer through the windshield, the breeze brings the smell of flourished life through the car, and the soft background music acts as the final ingredient for your new recipe of love. As the days sun sets, that road brings you down starry nights under the midsummer midnight sky. Nights remembered by neon lights reflecting off their eyes, that special touch you feel when you first hold hands after a date, and the music you sang to as you wallowed in the love filled air. It’s the roadway we all dream about, the perfect road with no twists or turns. No sudden pounding of the breaks or acceleration of the gas. You travel down that road at the perfect speed to wherever it takes your love.
As with all relationships the further down that road you travel, you start to experience bumps in the road. Those bumps can be the average wear and tear of the roadway. Bumps that don’t affect your love because they are the small bumps of life that everyone experiences. Then there are the gapping potholes you hit that make you say, “oh f*ck.” Bumps so big they shake everything and scare you. If your love is strong enough you’ll keep traveling down the road unscathed by the bumps you just experienced. If your love isn’t strong enough you may have to pull over and fix whatever is broken. Suddenly that once perfectly straight road begins to slowly twist and turn as the months or years pass you by, but that is how love works. Love isn’t a fairytale; love is supposed to challenge you, make you work, and make you a better person. If love was easy everyone would do it.
Soon you find yourself traveling down those sinuous roads looking up at road signs for a sense of direction. No one tells you which way to go, you just go, and pray that it’s the correct way. No one can tell you how love is supposed to work. There is no roadmap for it. Love is the all-powerful emotion that you can’t control.
It’s a ride over mountaintops full of emotions and feelings. A ride that brings new highs and lows into your life. Highs that make you feel untouchable and lows that bring you into darkness like you’ve never seen before. It’s the one true feeling that has no pure definition because it’s a feeling that’s deep within your heart and soul. As you continue down the winding roads, that love will be tested with every twist and turn.
Finally after the winding roads straighten out you come to an intersection and stop. You sit there waiting for the red light to turn green. The people in neighboring cars and the people walking down the street stop and stare at you. They judge how you got to this point; they form their own opinions and think they know what’s best for you. Suddenly you realize you’re the first car at light; you’re the first pawn that has to move. You freeze, your mind starts to over think, you stomach starts to hurt, and you feel alone. Thoughts and flashbacks race through your head and you think to yourself,
“What happened to that perfect road we once traveled down? That ride we took with the windows down and the music playing as we sang along to each and every song. The ride that we'd hold hands during no matter where we went. The ride where I'd look to my right and see a look of love in your eyes that would level me. Where did that road go?"
You wish you could make a U-turn and go back, but you can’t because the past is the past. You could turn left, which may change your love forever. You could turn right, which may end your love forever. Finally, you could go straight and proceed forward with that love, keeping that love alive.
We all tend to sit there and stew in a glass case of emotion. We let our thoughts run uncontrollably and we let everyone’s opinion effect us. Too many times we let outside forces steer us in the wrong direction. No matter how many stops you made on those roads, no experience or person can tell you how love is supposed to make you feel. That feeling of love is unique between you two. It’s a feeling that only you two share, something that no one else can or will understand. Outsiders will form their perception of your love, then they will judge it, and eventually they may try to tear you two apart. That’s when the sinuous road you traveled down can keep your love strong. Too often we let our emotions get the best of us and we don’t follow the one thing we should, our heart.
At each twist and turn and after each bump in the road, your love becomes battle tested. The small wounds your love suffered will heal over time. If your love fights small battles, win or lose, those battles make that love tougher and stronger. In time those numerous battles give you experience, experience you may need if your love finds itself in war. If that love is strong enough and you’re both willing to fight for it, no one can take it away. All of the experience you’ve gained will make you victorious in that war.
If the love you share is true love, accelerate straight through the intersection when the light turns green. Once you pass through it don’t look back. Look at them; see their smile and cherish the love that pours out of their eyes. As you look at them and you’re suddenly blown away by that gut-feeling words can’t describe, know that they are feeling the same exact thing. The same feeling you once felt long before when you first started traveling down that road.
Back when the sun shined perfectly off their skin and you knew you were falling for them. When their smile lit up the entire room and brought a smile to your face. When they'd walk into a room and take your breath away. When this drug like feeling first started running through your veins. A drug that would immerse your entire being, making you feel all those emotions you never knew existed. Feelings no roadmap or GPS could lead through. You had to travel down these roads blindly because you had to discover them on your own and make your own way. They're the feelings you couldn’t express no matter how hard you tried, whether in thought or through physical expression. Feelings that can only be described by one word. The one word that is indescribable.
Love.
