You know, something always bugged me about love.
I always assumed it was having someone there for you,
someone for you to care for and someone to care for you.
A star in a dark sky to show you the direction you were going,
the moon on your back lighting the way to somewhere warmer.
It was always an ember to me, something small but bright,
how it tricked your eye into being mesmerised by it,
how it danced on invisible winds and flowed like the air was water.
Sometimes it would happen little by little and other times all at once,
and when it was gone, it would make you beg for more,
have you scraping at the burning log to make more little embers.
I suppose there’s a beauty in that somehow, the subtlety of movement,
a staccato as a new breeze entered the ember’s airspace,
and how that little ember would judder in the air but still it would burn.

But years go by as they so often do, without warning or permission,
and you inevitably see things differently from a more mature viewpoint.
You have so much more to look back on, so much more to comprehend,
how everything you’ve ever done up to this point all fits together.
I don’t see love as one of those spritely little embers anymore,
love to me is so much more, a force of magic that binds souls together,
the universe, once thought so unforgiving, actually there to support you,
to guide you through the twilit marsh of existence, to heal the hurt.
I have experienced that magic firsthand, and I know it happens to everyone,
but so often we either look the other way or we can’t fathom what we see,
until it’s too late that is, when memories become cloudy with age,
when all that you had ever hoped to come true has been replaced by nothing,
but that too is magic, my friends, because magic knows nothing of time,
it transcends the very fabric of the universe that binds us.
Magic flows through the connections, seeps through the cracks,
and that is where love resides, not in the intimacy of no distance,
not in the warm embrace of someone who takes you for granted.
It’s in the very fibre of your being, you are composed of love,
of magic and the beautiful light show on display every waking moment.
Dance to the rhythm the universe provides, you are its melody.