Chapter One: Of love and other big things

Mac Miller understands me. To quote one of his lyrics— “love, love, love, love, love, love” and honestly? Same.

An existential crisis at 17 is normal. Or so I hope, and while searching for answers, I found one which I wasn’t even looking for.
I have stumbled upon quite an epiphany, and it is my duty as a fervid romantic to share it with you; so here goes. When you choose to live, when you choose to wake up in the mornings and go to sleep at night, be alive and feel all humanly emotions without the usual crutches of over the top measures of escapism, you are inadvertently choosing to love, to hope and to dream.

I do believe that love has a very unique effect on each one of us. For me, it’s evidently an emotional change as well as a physical one.
I experience love as a manifestation in my body. Something so unearthly that I feel as if I’m on a different plane entirely. It’s like a shock to my system, and not only that, but I do believe that falling in love with the people around you changes, how your mind functions in a very abstract manner. Why? Because when you allow yourself to be in love, you also give yourself a chance. When we feel worthy of loving someone, we slowly accept ourselves and notice—“Hey, maybe I’m not so bad after all”. We fall in love with ourselves.

Sometimes life does crack us open, and all our love is bled dry, drained from our bodies, and all that is left is the little hope still clinging onto the soft, blunt crevices, just waiting to be found. And finding that love within the embodiment of our souls, I believe, is our inherent duty.

The purpose of life is to find life; life within ourselves, life disparate from the beating of our hearts or the soft pulse we feel on the neck.

I love as easily as I breathe. It is second nature for me.
Love is a resumption of life itself. Love is an act of restoration after all has been lost. To love also means to lose because were you really made bereft of something if you never loved it?
It is my greatest strength and my most agonising weakness— that I give my heart away at a stroke. Ask for it, and it’s yours. But truly, what privilege it is for me to do so. What a privilege for me to be in love with all things that pulse with life for me to be able to laugh, to grieve and ultimately feel all things that are meant to be felt in the first place.

This is a highly unstructured piece that I have written, but I must go on because I feel like it and you’re my guest, haha.

The act of love is a transformative experience; for me at the very least it has been that way so far.
The people I love become my Gods for a season and the next. Such is love to me— the worship of one we deem holy in our heads.
To be a lover is to be a fighter, because what romantic are you if you don’t fight for what you love?
I leave you now with one final question, which I’m sure you must have heard before.

What would you do for love?