How does it feel to love?

I know, in books, they describe it as butterflies in your stomach, as a heat in your gut, as a dizziness in your head. But it doesn’t feel that way for me.

It feels like the warmth of a home-cooked meal, like the feeling when you collapse into bed after a tiring day, the duvet swaddling you.

But that’s not it.

Some days, it feels all-consuming, like an illness, making my chest hurt with how deeply I care. Sometimes it makes me cry, grieving for the time I lost on love. Other days I wonder if it’s worth it; if anyone will love me in return.

Love is painful, at heart. It’s a curse. Love doesn’t have mercy; it doesn’t discriminate. It picks you at random, and when it does, it sinks its claws into you like a vengeful lioness. It’s dangerous. It hurts. Not just that; it makes you vulnerable, makes it possible for others to hurt you.

“Love is like the sun” is another metaphor I’ve heard often. Honestly, I agree. Love is like the sun, but not in the way they mean. It’s not warmth, or home, or safety. It’s, in fact, quite the opposite. It’s putting your heart in another’s hands for them to ruin or protect, and you don’t have a choice in that. Love is like the sun, but equally dangerous, equally alluring; an unreachable ideal, a distant beam that beckons you with promises of warmth and light, but instead melts your wax-woven wings and sends you plummeting in a spiraling freefall with no end in sight. It makes an Icarus out of me, sinking my heart to the depths of the ocean and leaving it to the ground-feeders.

But I believe it’s worth it. Because when you fall to the seafoam, to the cresting waves that swallow you whole, you drown staring at the light through a blue-tinted screen, enjoying the warmth. Love is the last thing you see; the light at the end of the infinitely long tunnel. You never truly reach it, but you can certainly try, and if you fall while trying, at least the last thing you see will be its warmth.