my love,

let us tug

the hanging threads of

our seams a little more

and become nothing

but raw muscles and bones.

let us feel

through hot breath

and roaming fingers

and fall together

into a tangled mess,

becoming a single light

of ebullient heat

charged by the friction

of our kissing skin.

Come home to bed with me

so we can float together

down our river of sheets

drifting us towards the

heart of a yellow moon.

Together we’ll swim in our

slumber, and wrap our bodies

in a celestial blanket of a

fallen night sky and a

warm love.

I wonder if you

carry her around the same

way I did with you.

“Come back,” she whispered, “I love you.”

But he was already off, chasing the leaves in the wind.

I’ve always wondered: when people break up, where does all the love go? It doesn’t make sense to me how love can just disappear. The two people in the relationship still exist and the feelings that they shared and the plans they made did exist at some point. But they feel like this, I suppose; they feel like they’ve lost a bit of themselves. Whilst in a relationship, you give yourself to that person. You become a part of a whole. And now you are just a part again and you have to fill the other half of that whole with more of you. You have to recollect that ‘more of you,’ because you shared it away and now you have to find it again. But now you don’t know where it is, because where does the love go? It doesn’t just drop dead and make itself nonexistent. Love is too powerful and too potent of a feeling to just go away. It’s more like a balloon that you let slip out of your grasp, and now it’s flown away and swallowed up by the clouds. But it’s still there somewhere; it’s just lost. I believe that there is no such thing as falling out of love. Love can dwindle, but it doesn’t dissipate. You can forget about it, and that’s truly the saddest reach of love. But you’re always going to love a person you have fallen in love with, or more accurately, you’re always going to love who that person was to you at the time you fell in love with him or her. When you break up, you get hardened by love. The love you had, you force to stow away in the tiny notches of your heart hoping that it’ll disappear once you make it small enough. But it’s still there. You feel it more often than you think too, when you break up. Love translates itself and transforms into hurt. You get bitten in the ass by it. Thus, once you have your first love, there is no turning back. You get slapped in the face with cold reality once you start to carry the bit of hurt that will ultimately convert into knowledge that will make you wiser and cautious. You’ll get scars that no amount of creams or ointments can disappear. I don’t think there’s such a thing as being ready to love either. Nobody is ever truly ready to fall in love. Nobody is strong enough to withstand the depth of the fall and the amount of your being you put into it. We’re all just fragile human beings with breakable body parts and sensitive feelings. I don’t think anyone is ever too tough for love. When you fall in love, you give your whole self to it; you give, whether you realize or not, practically everything you have to the feeling, the person, and the relationship. Once you find yourself at the hand of love, you find yourself to be in the most vulnerable of states. But when in love, you become fearless in the amount of care and passion you put into the relationship. No one is ever truly ready for that. It’s just a question of deciding to be swept away by love when it presents itself to you.