Love

You enter the room as your eye catches a figure that strikes the very chord that rings through to your deepest desires. Intoxicated from his/her presence, your heart beats fast enough for two, and your breath escapes your lungs before you can control it. You tell yourself, “Remember to breathe.” You catalog and scrutinize your every word and action. It’s truly an out of body experience, and all you wish to do while you’re free from your body is to climb inside his/her mind and see how they’re looking at you.

You somehow make it through these awkward uncertainties of lust, and find yourself learning a new life. You weigh the things you have in common with the things you don’t, and try to remember as much information as you can, because it shows you’re paying attention, and so it doesn’t come back to haunt you in next week’s pop quiz.

You get lost in his/her eyes, smile for no reason, and you can’t stop thinking about them. You think about them at work, on the commute, while you’re eating your wheaties…you stay awake at night thinking about them, and when you finally get to sleep, you dream about them.

Your lives start melding together to the point where you know everything that’s going on in their day, and if there’s a sudden change or event that happens, you’ll get the news instantly via text message. Your friends slowly come to terms with the idea that there’s less of your time to go around, and hopefully understand cause they’ve been there before, or at least wish they could be there.

You think about your future together, what he/she will look like in 30 years, what your kids would look like, what your names look like next to each other, etc…but you DO NOT tell them, because you don’t want to freak them out with serious thoughts too soon.

Finally you get to a comfortable place where you know all their stories, all their history, all their quirky habits, and you feel like they fit so well with you. And you wonder where they’ve been all your life, and you wonder if they could be the person who you’ll walk with for the rest of your life, and you wonder how you could ever tell them just how much they mean to you. And you do the best you can, when you whisper the words…

“I love you.”

Love has so many different uses and meanings. People love books, and trees, children, and ice cream, dreaming about what could be, and remembering what was…but love is just a word that attempts to capture a feeling rooted in the nature of a relation between people and things.

Biology tells us that we perceive an external stimuli which effects our brain functions, causing the hypothalamus to produce peptides, that travel to our receptor cells giving us a specific sensation. In turn, we relate that sensation to the person or thing that caused it, and our memory creates a link between the two. So whenever you sense or think of that special person or thing, you can recreate that sensation.

Now that’s great and all, but for some reason love seems to be more than a chemical reaction. Love is so allusive and versatile that it represents more than a feeling. It signifies devotion, sacrifice, trust, commitment, and so much more than mere peptides.

So how do you define a word entrenched in subjective interpretation?

The true meaning of love rests without words inside of you. No dictionary or blog can encapsulate the depths of your mind. Only you can experience the love you feel. Only you can grasp the awe inspiring complexities rooted deep within a simple phrase like…

“I love you.”