Love is an incredibly strong word, meant for incredibly strong feelings. Most people throw it around like nothing. As my teacher sophomore year voiced, she found it waist-cringingly funny when she heard one of her students yell “I LOVE TATOR TOTS”. “You would really die for tator tots?” she replied. Trying to teach us the meaning behind our words, I always listened to her with unhinged ears.

There were days and nights when I whole-heartedly believed I wasn’t capable of loving, that I didn’t want to waste my time doing it. Maybe it was that I didn’t deserve to, or I didn’t think I did. Either way, for years I always found myself running the same circles.

Empty bottles, worn hands, wrinkled sheets, withered heart.

Just like snow, beautiful but cold.

I swallowed matches trying to set my soul on fire trying to feel something.

Until you.

When I met you, when you first spoke to me,

I felt my lungs slowly fill, the permafrost around my heart was liquefying.

Thinking, “Wow is this what it feels like to be ignited?”. I've tried a million times setting the butterflies in my stomach free, but for some reason they really like your company. And I don’t mind them. Their wings tickle and I think it means I love you.

I watched the hands of a clock run marathons and it felt like seconds when I was with you.

I said f**k it to clear blue swimming pools because I adored getting lost in the upside down of your brown eyes.

So used to breaking my bones to fit into places they don’t belong when the whole time your hands were the missing piece to my puzzle.

The first time I kissed you, or the first time you kissed me, or it doesn’t really matter because once it started I was unsure if I would be able to stop. The way your lips stuck to mine, as if they were drawn that way.

The first time I slept next to you I didn’t dream, there was nothing better for me to imagine. Everything I had ever wished for and whispered into my pillow had both of his arms around me.

We counted the stars backwards, unpacked boxes of memories and scarring stories. It only sewed you farther into my veins. Sitting in your lap until the indigo sky turned golden. Black coffee and charred lips from all the smoke. On my own back porch, being with you was the first time I felt home.

I could give you everything and never feel without as long as I still have your voice. I could sit here and try to map out my cosmic feelings for you, but words will never feel substantial enough for how you taught my heart to grow wings, to fly as high as it wants, no fear of being burned by the sun.

Love is hard, done incorrectly it can be immeasurably agonizing. Wth you, love is as natural as breathing. I don’t ever have to think about doing it. It happens on its own.

I think about the way the ocean perpetually kisses the shore. No matter how many times the waves are commissioned away, it stays bound forever. Im trying to tell you I’ll love you endlessly.

Love is an incredibly strong word. For incredibly strong feelings. The only problem I’m having; it’s not a strong enough word for the way I feel about you.