Love is an Hourglass

I guess it’s true when they say love is like an hourglass; the brain empties, as the heart fills up. And then sometimes that hourglass is turned upside down, and the opposite thing happens. You keep pinching yourself to see if you’re dreaming, but love is something that makes you never want to sleep, because in this special case, reality is better than your dreams.

You can fall into so many things, yet there you are, skinning your knees as you fall for someone, letting them put the band-aids on you, forgetting the antiseptic. But you shouldn’t fall for someone who won’t be there to catch you. And sometimes you wish you were a little kid again, falling off your bike, instead of slipping through the threshold of love’s powerful grip. Skinned knees are easier to fix than broken hearts.

In the game of love there will be good times, and there will be bad times. No matter what you do or say, or how much you try to hide from them, they are inevitable. Like a war, it’s hard to end, but so easy to start. You give over to one person the power to destroy you, to hold something as fragile as your heart, and you trust them not to. You never know what you’re risking, by giving away such a fragile object. And in the war of love, it seems that most battles are fought internally with your own conscience and mind. You’re trying to fight love.

Love, though you may deny it, governs your moods the way your brain controls your breathing. It controls if you have a good day, or a bad day. It changes your moods by making you either happy or sad, or trapped at some teetering place on the line between. And you try to bring your normal consciousness back; you try to start thinking with your head again, not your heart.

But you can’t stop your heart from doing some thinking and feeling every now and then. But if you try, things can be more painful. Suddenly, you’ll realize that you lost what you never had. If you’d listened to the little voice that told you to act, you might have had something wonderful. But there’s always that chance that your confessions will be rejected back in your face, and it feels like they’ve been dropped back on you like a ton of bricks dropped from the Empire State Building. But is this better than loving and losing, really, is it?

When you lose something, you know it’s so painful, that you had it, right there in your grip, and it got away. It’s like losing that favorite toy you had, when you were a kid. You played with it every day, and then you discovered it missing. You spent hours crying about it, but you didn’t want a new toy. All you wanted back was what you had in the first place. But you know you’ll never have it again. Your senses were teased and fooled, thinking things were so good when you had what you liked, and that things would be that way forever and ever, happily ever after. Then all that happiness is taken away, and you have to find something new to fill your heart.

Lending your heart out like a cheap movie rental service, you never know what damages the renter could cause before you’re returned. And yet while you lend your heart out, it’s just being used. Just being watched a few times, and then returned to the way things were before. And you were the one that paid the fees. You paid the fees with your own emotions and hurt.

But love can be wonderful, while it lasts. It’s like a warm breeze that plays with your hair. You can’t actually see it, but you can feel it, and pick up the effects it leaves as it passes and eventually dies out. That blissful feeling of having someone to hold and talk to, to share your feelings really is too much for words. Even the most poetic sonatas cannot truly capture the essence of love. It has its own taste, smell, and feel, look, sound… everything. The world is so much different when you’re in love… so much better.

You always have someone to catch you when you fall, and you know you can run to someone for comfort. These people are like the good tissues, the ones that don’t hurt your nose when you sniffle. You can dry your eyes on their shoulders, and you can count on hearing wise words of comfort, and you always feel ten times better after you’ve been just letting your feelings fly with them.

Love is also little things, like loving the imperfections. After all, imperfections are what make you perfect. It’s not wanting to be with someone, it’s being unable to picture yourself without them. It’s the blossoms on the rose; it’s the light shining in the darkness. It’s so many things, in so many places, and it reflects in your eyes and your actions and your voice. And you can tell. You can tell that you’re happy. Happy in love. You feel on top of the world, and there’s nothing that can bring you down. Nothing will rain on your picnic.

But there are ants involved in the picnic of love. They come silently and discreetly, and you don't notice them stealing what you've worked so hard for, until it's too late. They've taken small bites of what you wanted, and have carried it away, forever to be theirs. They've stolen your love. Taken it away with their strength, strength that you don't seem to have.

Then you see the days so sunny, stricken by a thunderstorm. It rains upon what was left of your picnic. It frosts your beautiful roses. For a few moments, you feel like the world has stopped rotating, and that you’re being sucked into a black hole. And you’re spiraling down, and down, and down.

Love isn’t the same then. It’s gone from deep, to barely skimming the surface, back to the mutual way it was before love. It’s like your glass heart has been handed back to you, crushed into a million tiny shards, and they’ll never be able to be glued back together.

It takes time, but you will begin to piece them together again, slowly. With duct tape and superglue, no doubt, it will hold for a while. But slowly, it heals, like broken bones do, but if you were to perform an X-Ray of your heart, you could see that your heart was broken once, just like the way you can tell with broken bones. Life returns to a fraction of the norm, and then you really do realize…

Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have. There is more to love than just the romantic kind that we all think about from time to time. But most of all, you shouldn’t cry because it’s over. You should smile because it happened.