One day, you will find a home, and it won’t be a place, it will be a person. And you will be loved in spite of all the baggage and boxes you bring with you.

She wants a love so powerful it wipes out everything else.

But love means different things to different people. It can be unexplainable, happen in mysterious ways. Even if her whole life the moon has been told to only love the night, sometimes instead she loves the way the sun lights up the days.

Kiss to inhale the scent of someone you have dreamt of kissing. Kiss until you are dizzy, unable to remember any moments before this one. Kiss like it’s the greatest thing you’ve ever done.

Write in journals the things you are grateful for, make time for an old friend, walk in the mornings as the sun is rising, spend less time focusing on your faults, spend even less time reading rants on social media, plant flowers, check the mailbox, cook a new recipe, dance in your living room. Be in love with living.

I love the way you make me feel. Like I am more than an afterthought, or a second guess, or a maybe. You make me feel like I am your first thought, only choice, a certainty.

Of course, there are different kinds of love. There is infatuation and physical and emotional love. There’s respect and comfort love. There’s the kind of love you ignore, the kind you can’t stop thinking about, the kind you make work, the kind that seems impossible. But the love of your life embodies all love. That kind of love is all-consuming, emotional, physical, comforting. It doesn’t matter how many times you say “I love you,” at the end of the day, you know they will stay. True love doesn’t run away.

You can say anything you want

But showing is different

You keep her by showing how much you love her

You will heal

She came home one night, peeled off all her clothes, wrapped herself in her robe. And she had been telling me about her day. Since the moment she walked through our bedroom door, absently playing with her hair, petting the dog, words racing and rolling over each other as she explained all the things that had happened. And it didn’t matter to me if the next eighty years were spent listening to her day from start to finish, because I want to listen. I love to listen to her. This is how I know she is the one, because I can’t imagine listening to anyone else.

Love can be found across oceans, or in coffee shops over long, drawn out days. It can be right around the corner or weekends spent boarding planes. Where love is found, there is life, even if life begins when we least expect it to.