hello, dear

oh. hi tumblr. i forgot you existed for a while.

I know you care I see it in the way that you stare As if there was trouble ahead and you knew it I'll be saving myself from the ruin And I know you care I know it's always been there

Have you ever seen someone? Not looked at, but seen. You know, when you mentally undress them, wipe off the mask that's made up with make up or maybe just fake smiles. Peel back the skin, the stress lines, the scar on their left eyebrow. Stare at the muscles and organs and bones. See what holds them together, what keeps the tethers from unraveling. Read the unforgotten words carved in perfect cursive on their ribcage. Look at the photographs wedged in between each vertebrae of important people and the places they went. Listen to the nostalgic melodies pushing through their veins, aching to get break free from their constraint. See their heart. See the parts that have chipped off, floated away. The parts that are clinging to a single thread. The parts that are a deeper red, a lighter red, a newer red. Find this, and you'll find that you've finally seen someone.

There are so many metaphors that seem to do love justice in my mind but when I try to stamp them out in ink, words fail me. Words, I'm now beginning to realize, are not enough for true love. There is no combination of letters that can ever be strung together to properly depict the way the words 'I love you' feel when they finally wedge their way out from behind your teeth for the first time, or to describe the sensation of being held by the person you love which I imagine is comparable to your heart seeping out of every pore in your body all at once. Whoever came up with the phrase "butterflies in the stomach" was a filthy liar because seeing the love of your life is more comparable to a herd of elephants stampeding through every organ in your body, weighing you down and causing your knees to become so fragile that you feel the sudden urge to drop to the ground. But even those sentences cannot accurately explain true love, because true love is inexplicable.