One day you’re going to meet someone, and everything will make sense.

All of the sleepless nights, heartbreaks, rejections, unrequited crushes, moments that made you doubt yourself and doubt love and doubt everything in between. It will all dissolve the moment you meet them, the moment they wrap you in their arms and you think, “This. This is what I was waiting for.”

You’ll know, because everything will make sense.

You won’t be sitting there questioning the validity of your feelings. Because your feelings will be unquestionable, and your feelings will be nothing but sure. You won’t be sitting there wondering what love feels like, if butterflies are real, if it’s possible to meet a person and feel your souls saying, “You. I was waiting for you.”

One day you’re going to meet someone, and everything will make sense.

The times when you were defeated, when love was ripped away from you, when people couldn’t and didn’t love you back. All of those hard times and bad times and rough times will feel like a distant memory because all you’ll be able to focus on will be them.

This person, who loves you so completely and wonderfully, will be all that matters.

Because they love you the way you deserve, the way you’ve wanted.

One day you’re going to meet someone, and everything will make sense.

Those love songs you rolled your eyes at will have you singing along, those poetry books will have new meaning, even text messages will make you smile at times you never thought possible because you’ll be in love. You’ll be in love. And you’ll be in a love so pure and so magical that everything you previously found unrelatable will start to look like your life.

Your mind will be at ease, your heart will feel like it’s found home.

Because when you meet that person, everything will be calm. Everything will be good. Everything will feel like it’s been leading up to the moment when you stopped, laid eyes on them, and your life completely changes.

One day you’re going to meet someone, and everything will make sense.

You just have to be willing to wait to meet them.

Love isn’t supposed to be perfect. I mean, that should be common knowledge considering nothing in life is. Things are flawed, complicated, and never exactly how we expect them to be. We’re humans, which means we screw up. It means we try and mean well, but fumble over our humble mistakes.

You know that’s okay, right?

There’s this misconception that love means holding out for perfection. Even though we all claim we know that doesn’t exist. People still cling to it. Like love will somehow be the exception. “Don’t you dare settle!” Wait for magnetism! A kiss that feels like fire and lava and happiness rolled into one. Wait! Wait!

Everyone says love should look like it’s been torn out of a romance novel. That means you never question it. That means you never have doubts. You ride off together on horses into the sunset, or whatever other shitty movie ending you want to substitute.

That’s not how life works. That’s not how love works.

Love is messy. Love is vulnerability, and vulnerability means imperfection. It’s you showing the parts of yourself that aren’t beautiful. It means honesty in the ugliness. It means nights that aren’t romantic. It means nights that are real instead.

Love shouldn’t sound like your favorite pop song. Sometimes, sure. I’m not saying fireworks don’t exist. They damn sure do. But fireworks aren’t the only thing that matters.

Love is waking up with sleep crust in your eyes. Love is accidentally farting during sex or walking around with spinach in your teeth all day and NO ONE TOLD YOU until now. Love is embarrassing stories that people tell at family parties.

Love is choosing to stay in it. Love is putting in the work. Love is saying, “I want you,” even when things are hard and bowing out would be the easier option.

When you find this love, the love that sticks around, it will not always be pretty and something you want to stick on Instagram. It will have frustration and error. It will have arguments and discussions and emotions that aren’t all happy ones.

Love, like any part of life, is meant to be layered.

Stop thinking Nicholas Sparks is writing your love life. Start enjoying the actual human being you’re with instead. It’s so much better that way. I promise, it’s so much more rewarding.

I am the girl men turn to in order to forget slivers of yesterdays they don’t want to remember, as though I am the best way to run past the greyness of weeks and years kissed brusquely by routine and washed-out dreams. As though I have much to give, as though the pallor of my cheeks are enough to paint their mornings in shocking technicolor, as though I have within my palms the answer to prayers they never thought to ask for.

There is no promise of endless adventures in the tips of my fingertips, dear.

No guarantee of constant bliss. I can assure you of sleepless nights underneath starry skies but not of continuous evenings such as this. I can assure unplanned journeys through unmapped streets and dirt roads but, I’m sorry, if I run away at the slightest kiss.

I am an accident about to happen -a timebomb about the explode. The reason why they scratch names on tombstones and place signs on pedestrian zones. There is no rope to tie me down, I had already built my own gilded cage -determined not to let anyone too close to see how much of an unhinged, hollow spectacle I can be (without the coffee, without the tea, without the smile I wear ear to ear, with just me and 300 complaints packed in a suitcase).

I can tell you a thousand reasons why you should leave but if you really mean to stay then please do.

I won’t beg for you to keep your fingers intertwined with mine because I can’t promise you enough warmth from my own. You make me wish I wasn’t broken as much just so I can give you all that you lack. But I’m a walking carcass with an eggshell of a heartbeat and there is not much left of me.

If I run away all of a sudden, I apologize. I am restless and unkind even to myself. But I will always keep a pocketful of your words in the back of my mind. I can’t be owned and I don’t wish to be. Don’t try to rebuild or mend me while you listen to the crossfire of my thoughts in the morning. I had earned enough scars to write poetry.

I will tell you a thousand reasons why you should leave but if you really mean to stay, then please do.

Relearn the world with me.

We’re equally balanced, but I’m holding the edge, to soften the impact of the crash, while you’re spreading your arms, embracing the fall.

You reach the ground first, turn around and say, “I’m in love with you.”

I gasp and say, “I’m still falling.”