Nine weeks ago, I fell in love.

Nine weeks ago, I fell in love.

In every photo taken of me since, I am grinning like an utter fool, incapable of keeping down this joy-love-ecstasy that needs its outlet—was put inside me to be broadcast, whether I like it or not.

Cheesing, is what you would call my face.

Now all of a sudden, I’m that infamously annoying school girl, scrolling through my library and sighing over every photo of us together, (barely) resisting the urge to publicly publish every portrait of my love, lest my peers catch on to why I’ve been unable to write since my brain got hijacked my Cupid’s smirking, bare-assed countenance.

The flip side to my “in love” coin is the pain-fear-terror that has linked itself onto my opposing arm, such that I am walking down the street, arm-in-arm with joy and fear simultaneously. To say that the foundations beneath me have been disrupted is a comical minimization, my friends. Jackhammers have become my life, jackhammering the ground I stand on, everywhere I go.

But what the poets seem to know, which the public will not tell you, is that sometimes it takes a jackhammer to build up something bigger, stronger, and better than before. The work of the jackhammer, the embrace of the lover. One dismantles and the other reinvigorates. I am therefore in this cycle of destruction and reparation, every day and every night, and I have never felt more alive, nor more exposed.

Thank God the man who sees me, sees me for who I truly am:

Shaken, yes. Scared, yes. But never more replete with such a fierce, impassioned urge for unending, unwritten life.