#warmfeelings

Being in love is like feeling the warmth of the sun on a cold day, that gentle glow that spreads from your heart to every part of you. It’s in the way their laugh becomes your favorite sound, how it echoes like music in your mind, lifting your spirits even when they’re not there. You start noticing that the simplest things remind you of them—like the scent of coffee, a favorite song on the radio, or a sunset that mirrors the depth of their eyes. Suddenly, the world is full of signs, all pointing back to how lucky you are to have found them.

You know you’re in love when their happiness becomes just as important as your own, when you’d do anything to see their smile, to be the person who makes their days a little brighter. You find yourself wanting to be their safe place, the one who can hold them through their hardest days and celebrate with them when everything goes right. You want to share all their little triumphs and be their hand to hold through the struggles, to walk beside them on this unpredictable journey. And it’s more than just wanting to be in their life—you want to be part of their story, shaping each chapter together, side by side.

You feel like you’re home when you’re with them, like you can let down your guard and be completely yourself. There’s something magical in that, in the way you can share your dreams, your wildest thoughts, and even your silliest fears without a second thought. You can sit together in silence, and it feels like the most profound conversation. In those moments, every glance, every touch carries a promise—a quiet understanding that this connection is something special, something worth holding on to.

You know you’re in love when you start dreaming of a future, and they’re always a part of it. It’s not that you can’t imagine your life without them—it’s that you don’t want to. They make every plan, every adventure, every quiet evening feel more meaningful. You imagine what it would be like to travel to new places together, to face challenges and celebrate milestones with them by your side. And in those daydreams, you realize that the idea of growing together, of sharing a life, fills you with a kind of hope you didn’t even know you were missing.

And perhaps most of all, you know you’re in love because of the way they make you believe in magic again—the kind that comes from finding a soul that understands yours so completely, so deeply. It’s like discovering a hidden piece of yourself that you never knew was missing until they brought it to light. There’s a sense of awe in realizing that out of all the people in the world, you found each other, and that you get to call this feeling your own.

In the end, love isn’t about the grand gestures; it’s about the quiet moments that feel like they’re just yours, the way they make you laugh a little louder, and how the ordinary days become extraordinary simply because they’re in them. It’s in the way your heart feels fuller, your world feels brighter, and your dreams feel more alive because of them. That’s when you know you’re in love—when everything feels like a little miracle, just because they’re a part of your life.

Fancy day at Prater, Vienna

I’m not going to pretend you caught my eye right away.  Not the first time I shook your hand, or the next time I bumped into you in the hallway,  or even the time after that when a whole bunch of us went out to dinner  and you explained the glory of your beard to me.

But you snuck up on me like the vodka I threw back the second time we drank together and I guess you could say the warmth that I felt spreading through my body has kind of stayed with me ever since. (We took shots to celebrate you breaking up with your then-girlfriend, which I think is a little bit of poetic justice on its own, but that’s irrelevant.)

I’ve always been a bit of a black sheep in my family and sometimes I used to wonder if that’s what attracted you to me considering your love for all things sheep.

Here’s how I see it. I’m a Bengali-American woman from a Muslim family with nine tattoos too many, eyeliner sharper than my tongue on some days, and a red lip dark enough to make me feel like sin. I walked with a warning sign right over my heart but somehow, you kind of just looked at the caution tape, decided it was worth the risk, and came knocking on the door anyways.

The first day you asked me what my favorite color was. The next day you asked me what my favorite food was. The day after that you asked me who my favorite person was.

And while your version of a one-sided 21 questions amused me, I didn’t realize until it was too late how easy it was to answer. It made sense to tell you that I grew to love the color blue after years of feeling just that, that my favorite food was anything my mother cooked because it reminded me of my childhood, and that my favorite person in the world…did not exist.

Now, I wonder if this was your plan all along. To teach me that breakfast is an all day meal or that mismatching my socks will make me even sexier or that Batman was the only superhero you’d let me fawn over cause…let’s face it. You’d be right there fawning with me.