A flicker in the chest, they call it love,
but maybe it’s the spark igniting the forge.
“Side effect,” the words whisper,
a byproduct of something wilder, deeper.
Tell me, honestly,
have you ever held something dear,
a sunrise painted across a lover’s face,
the way a child’s laughter spills like spilled starlight,
and not felt the urge, the ache,
to capture it, to hold it, to …make?
A song, a clumsy melody hummed in the shower,
a poem scribbled on a napkin, stained with coffee,
a prayer, a desperate plea to the uncaring sky,
even a mess, a chaotic burst of paint,
a kitchen floor sticky with the remnants of late night baking,
a testament to shared joy.
Love, they say, is blind,
but I say it’s the only thing that sees too much,
sees the fleeting beauty, the fragile moments,
the way the world is always slipping through our fingers.
And in the reckless abandon,
it demands immortality.
Not in stone or bronze,
but in the echoes of a song sung late at night,
in the worn pages of a love letter,
in the memories we build, brick by fragile brick,
a legacy of feeling, a monument to the heart’s wild,
untamed creation.
Because love, it doesn’t just feel, it …does.
It spills out, it overflows, it paints the world.
in the colors of our deepest desires,
leaving behind a trail of art, a testament
to the messy, beautiful, undeniable truth:
we were here, we loved, we…made.
By Elizabeth Proett