love is

love was never supposed to not fuck you up.

love is seeing the ugliest side of a human, someone the same as you

love is looking in a mirror at the worst of yourself

love is seeing the raw, bloody flaws of another human and cradling them in your arms

love is growth

love is adoption

love is choosing a human being and deciding that you want to spend your one life that you’ve been given with them even though they’ve taken your deepest insecurities and slashed them till they bled

love is forgiving yourself after you do the same to them

love is taking another person and making them the personification of the feelings that enter your soul whenever you see their smile

and maybe that’s the problem

that we take the sacred, incomprehensibly beautiful thing that is love and we assign it to another sick, twisted, fucked up human being and expect them to live up to it

we fall into the illusion that love is perfect

love was never supposed to be perfect and I do not know where that idea comes from

love is ugly

love is a catastrophe

yet we all think it should be perfect

don’t we

we chase after it

we dream about what love could be and we turn these dreams into books and movies and assign an entire genre to it

love is not romance

love is not sex.

love is stumbling upon a mirror in a dark alleyway and staring at a melted, raw version of yourself and smiling because you know that’s what you are and you’re okay with it

love is vulnerability

love is craving for these feelings to last forever but realizing that the only way to make them last is to give all of yourself

everything you have

but that puts you at risk.

crippling vulnerability being the only path to the possibility of something deeper

the cruel irony

love is taking off your armor and laying naked in front of the person you choose, begging them to accept you

love is when they do.

because the “them"s and “they"s are just you

because you are someone else to everyone else

every time you look someone in the eyes you are gazing into a reflection

you are staring into another subjective reality, and that reality is gazing right back at you

both perspectives think they’re the only ones who "really get it”

love is realizing that we’re specks of dust on a rock flying through infinite darkness for a nanosecond in time and that all we have is each other

love is taking this truth and not letting it intimidate you

love is not what they tell you it is

love is being willing to die for someone you've hated

love is finally accepting yourself through another person

love is everything

love is

https://oc.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/5wxb85/black_swans_exist_somewhere/

https://oc.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/5wt3jw/thinking/