I Love Love

I love love.

And I refuse to call myself a hopeless romantic,for what is so hopeless about believingthat somewhere beneath this enormous sky,there is someone out there for me,and I, too, am somebody’s someone?

Perhaps we are still strangers,living beneath different pieces of the same sky,our names yet to find their wayinto each other’s vocabulary,our footsteps yet to meeton the same stretch of earth.

But I refuse to let the passing of timepersuade me that love has forgotten my address,or let the years convince my heartthat what has not yet arrivedwas never meant to find me.

I refuse to mistake waiting for rejection,or absence for impossibility.

For truth be told,I love love.

Not because there is someonewhose arms I can call home,or a pair of lips waitingto kiss the weariness from my forehead.

Not because my heart belongs to another,or because another has entrusted me with theirs.

I love love simply because I do.

I love it in the quiet tenderness of ordinary things,in the morning sun spilling gold across my windowsill,in flowers that bloom without ever askingwhether someone will stop to admire them.

I love it in the laughter of friends,in the familiar warmth of an embrace,in the way the world keeps offeringlittle pieces of itselfto anyone willing to notice.

And perhaps that is what it meansto truly love love.

To find it beautifuleven when it has not takenthe shape you have been longing for.

To be so deeply in love with livingthat the absence of a loverdoes not make the worldany less worthy of your affection.

Of course, I still dreamof finding someonewhose heart will learn the rhythm of mine,someone with whom the ordinarywill feel a little extraordinary.

And when that day comes,I hope to welcome lovenot as a starving heartfinally being fed,but as a heart already full,making room for one more beautiful thing.

Until then,I will keep loving.

I will buy myself flowers,write poetry about beautiful things,and fall in love with the little momentsthat make a lifetime worth remembering.

I will not spend my daysmourning a love I have yet to meetwhile overlooking the lovethat has been here all along.

So call me a romantic,a dreamer,a heart too fond of beautiful possibilities.

But do not call me hopeless.

For I have never believedthat love beginsthe moment someone falls in love with me.

I believe love has been here all along,and I have been in love with itall this time.