Love can come in four different forms, almost akin to the seasons. It is fluid, and can intertwine with the other seasons, but never truly sits still. Love is never constant, and it fades as quickly as the cooling kiss of a summer breeze.
Springtime love is electric, a bitter hour in which it seems that this love is all that matters. It is all encompassing, and galvanises you into action. To feel Springtime love is to feel alive, after days and weeks and months of quiet. It is the cheer of a crowd, the press of bodies and the pounding in your ears. Springtime love is exciting and new, no matter how many springs you've seen before.
Summertime love is a lazy creek, trickling slowly across the sun scorched rocks of a small waterfall. It is the curling vapour drifting up from the surface of the water, and the sweet lemon in a glass of lemonade. Summertime love is warmth and honey, and its cloying grip is both calming water and slow-burning flame.
Autumnal love is passionate, sour and fast, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it flash of clarity among the Indian summers and oncoming storms. It is the rain bearing down on a windowpane, morose and ferocious, and it is breathtaking. Autumnal love seems like the truest of the four, the kind of pain that one who is in love craves like nothing else. Autumnal love is hopeless, beautiful fury.
Wintering love is not kind, or violent, or sweet. It is the salt on the foam of a crashing wave, a lukewarm coffee abandoned overnight, the eye of the storm you can never escape. Wintering love is acceptance, and sorrow, and blessed silence, and only in winter do the other seasons of love look like a lie. Wintering love is regret, and terrified of when spring arrives once more.
Every time you fall in love, you live the days from spring to winter. Some love-years last days, and others last centuries, ages, eons, until even the sands of time forget that snow or rain ever fell there. The beautiful thing about humans, I find, is that even after a thousand winters, a human can be willing to sacrifice everything for one more spring.
