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[to the people who doubt us and the people who don't, and every soul out there who wants an outsider's opinion on love]
What is love. I find myself questioning this so much, practically every time someone says something to question my own. Is it sexual? Or does it have to border on platonic? Or is it something else entirely.
I have come to some sort of a conclusion. They say love is like a restricting feeling in your heart, like you can't live without the other person. I'll be extremely brutal here- my memory is so bad that traumatising events that would scar someone else for life just get swept off every week, and I forget all about it. I can live without you. But some subconscious part of me will miss you terribly. Miss how you'd react to that one line i said, how you'd look at me with that "omg you're such a dork why am i with you" expression and how all your selfies are side-portraits with your fringe/cap/something covering your scar because.
I love you the way you'd love an artwork, beautiful and complex, something I don't see flaws in. That's even after being with you for quite a bit, so no one can claim it's because of the rose-tinted lens or something. I think you're a different kind of beautiful from everyone around you, like a rose in a sea of violets. And I really, really like roses.
I love you like a best friend. I want to keep your secrets (and accidentally spill them all over the table when someone comes over), I want to pass idiotic notes to you, I want you to go around the world with me, etc etc.
There are the more traditional ways I love you: I want you to be the first person I see when I wake up, I want to always be with you, I want you to love me at my best and at my worst, I want to defend you from everything in the world.
But with teenage hormones and ahem other factors, a lot of people doubt whatever is between us is love. I mean, sure a lot of people that we care about don't mind and support us, but if positivity is water negativity is ink. One drop will dye everything black.
But I want you to know something. It doesn't matter whether "If you met the right girl you wouldn't be together" or "All you want is to be in a relationship you don't actually love each other".
I love you right now in this very fucking moment. And it doesn't matter if I ignore you for extended spans during the term (it does but not in this context i'm sorry please forgive me i have phases); it doesn't matter whether I constantly joke about having affairs (and you having affairs); it doesn't matter if either of us ends up with someone else, someone very much unlike physically and personality-wise.
I talk about you a lot. Years later I might say it's because I thought I was cool for being this way, or it was because I was such a boring person and there was nothing better going on in my life. This plagues me at night, honestly. But I realised that when I like something, I flaunt it. I would never put it in a locker cupboard and throw away the key. I treasure it to its fullest, and I want the entire world to see it and think that it's beautiful (in this case our relationship), and when it is truly time to leave it behind, I will, with nothing left but the happiness it gave me. Sometimes I don't leave it behind. I want to carve it in ice and burn it into my skin, so that one day, I can look at the mark and think back and all of this and say, “what a beautiful thing happened to me”
I want it to be public. I accept that there is a certain level that it has to be under due to certain circumstances, I know you don't want people to judge you and view you differently because of this,and that our reputations as heroes are on the line, but you are my better half, and fuck you are quite a large part of my life, and I like to talk about you as much as I like to talk about whatever I'm obsessing over at the moment (chemical engineering ahem)
I know you're the type of person to worry immensely about the future, and I'm more of a "here and now" person, but you know what? Just this once, fuck the future. Fuck everyone else. I think I love you, I believe with my entire heart I love you. And I think you love me too. So does it matter right now that maybe five years from now that you'll realise that maybe your love for me was mostly platonic. Hell- does it matter that much right now that maybe your father will hack into your phone (it could happen) and ask you to explain and you will have to claim that you never really loved me. Well, it shouldn't. It hasn't happened. And from now on (at least after this is posted) I will try to prevent these things from happening.
I wear the burns on my back than you gave me the first time we fought like a tattoo, or maybe like a brand, because much like how we mark the things we own, it reminds me of you. I don't see you my owner (cept of my heart), but when I see it I remember that there is someone in this world that doesn't hate me, who I am always awkwardly lodged in the side of their brain, that despite my (occasionally shitty) personality the world gave me someone as perfect as you.
I've matured (slightly). I don't need you to tell me you love me all the time (a reminder is nice). I don't need you to sing me love songs, or write me shitty poetry, or kiss me in public (sorry about that I'm just a teensy (not) bit jealous of the others).
All I need is to believe that you are in love with me, right in this moment, and I (and myself only) choose to call this little emotion I feel for you romantic love.
To everyone who asked "What is love" that night, and to anyone who's ever been confused, here is my (dumb little) definition of love. You think that the emotion you feel for this person, in this very moment, should be called love. That is all it takes to love someone.