Love

And as undeserving as you think you are

You do end up getting more than you

Ever thought you would

It just takes a while to realise

Not because they don't love you enough

Because they do

But because it's too good to be true

And you are so damn afraid that

If you accept it, if you embrace it,

If you get used to having so much love in your life

That you would lose it all

That they would leave

But you know they are here to stay because

They don't give up on you

They don't walk away

Just when you think you've lost them like countless others

They take your hand in theirs and

Walk with you

Days like this

And on some days

It is as hard to speak

As it is to place myself

Somewhere in the future

As near as three years

And as far as a decade

On some days

There is no future

And there are no words

There is only the struggle of

Taking it one breath at a time

Love

When I was thirteen, I dismissed the reflection of a gawky kid in the mirror

And told myself that as soon as I turned sixteen

I would be swept off my feet by some boy

When I was fifteen, I told this boy I had a massive crush on that I liked him

And he told me he didn't feel the same way but it didn't matter

Because I stopped liking him a few months later

I turned sixteen and was that an uneventful year

There was no boy who would sweep me off my feet

Not when I was sixteen, not when I was seventeen and not when I was eighteen

But nineteen held a lot of hope and I did get swept off my feet

Only to learn that adult relationships are complicated

And nothing like the fairytales

I nursed my broken heart for the next few years

Slowly realising, or perhaps, slowly accepting that

I would never have this Hollywoodesque romance

Today I had a glimpse of what my future holds

What I would be like when I'm forty or fifty

And it dawned on me that some of us never get their love story

So I will watch as my friends fall in and out of love

I will talk to people I never see again

And I will learn to live with the kind of loneliness some of us take with us to our graves

Panthera

Perhaps I do have a type

This one kind of person I gravitate towards

And then run away from

But if we are being honest

I'm clutching at straws here

You two aren't alike