People always talk about the importance of a first love, but I always found a second love as equally important, if not more so.
The second love validates that the first sensations you experienced was actually love. A second love is more cautious, and you know more about yourself, so you more readily know what you're getting in to. A second love proves to you that you can love again, that all those amazing, heartbreaking, breathtaking you thought were over forever can indeed happen again.
A second love is falling in love with love all over again.
We fall in love with feelings every day.
I've fallen in love with the morning before the sun rises, in between night and day. I've fallen for the dust swirling in the air that only appears when a beam of morning sunlight falls through the window. I've learned to love being stretched out, skin taught, basking under the sun until it lulls me to sleep. I've fallen in love with reading a book on the beach, with the rest of the world spinning around me, each person absorbed in their own path. I've fallen for the silence in the woods in summer, slender trees whispering around me.
We fall in love with things too.
I fell in love with the touch of cashmere on my fingertips, and the feeling of good, thick paper. With the hardwood floors lining the long halls in my school that were born before my great grandmother, that have been creaked over by hundreds of years of girls in uniforms. I fell in love the curves of my violin, with its deep, swirling grain, and the willowy sway of the bow. I love the flour dusted over a rolling pin and the pinches of pie crust.
We fall in love with the words that people craft.
I first fell in love with stories with simple morals, and then poems with delightful, breathless pauses. Then I learned to love metaphors that drop as deep in meaning as one is willing to dive. I fell in love with the perfect diction choices, and the changes in syntax from different authors. Words beat in rhythm with my heart
But to fall in love with another living, breathing person?
People change and feel and hide what they mean. To fall in love with a person is to fall in love with a million things at once: the shorter strands of hair that always fall out of a ponytail, the moments leading up to a smile, the way they prop their head when they're not quite in reality. To fall in love with a person is to fall in love with feelings and things and words all at once.
What a lovely, lovely concept.
What a lovely thing it is to be in love.
♡
