Funny How Life Works

For Boltie

https://open.spotify.com/track/5RzU8hzVg9zVV0be7tb9kV?si=N6QF1KBzR9CKNoHpGEHu9Q

You know, it’s funny how life works, how it often refuses the order we expect of it. How it rearranges the familiar and calls it growth. How it introduces people into our lives quietly, without ceremony, and then waits until we are settled before revealing what they mean to us. I have learned that the heart does not announce its intentions. It changes its mind slowly, almost politely, and only later demands to be taken seriously.

We did not begin with importance. We began with ease. With conversation that asked for nothing. With laughter that did not linger long enough to feel dangerous. Acquaintances, then friends, then something that did not trouble itself with names. Best friends, perhaps, though even that feels insufficient now. There was no moment I can point to and say, this is where it happened. It unfolded the way understanding often does—gradually, until one day it was simply there.

Now, you are where my thoughts go when the day loosens its grip on me. When something small happens—something unremarkable, something that would normally pass without record—it is you I think of telling. Not because the thing itself matters, but because being heard by you does. I did not plan this. I only noticed, much later, that the habit had already formed.

I think often about the state of my heart, about what it carries and what it has learned to protect. It is not untouched. It has known hope and disappointment in equal measure. It has loved once with the innocence of believing love would be enough, and again with the caution that comes from knowing it might not be. If my heart were a treasure, it would not shine easily. It would show evidence of handling, of having been trusted to the wrong hands, of having survived what it was never meant to endure. And yet, it remains capable of wanting. That is the part that surprises me still.

With you, that wanting feels both familiar and newly sharpened. We share jokes that need no explanation, laughter that comes without effort. We speak of futures lightly, almost playfully, and then fall quiet, as though aware of how close imagination can come to desire. We kissed once. The kind of kiss that does not insist, that does not hurry itself into meaning. Still, it altered the space between us. You became closer. Clearer. And yet, you did not become mine.

The world has much to say about this. It always does when a woman allows herself to feel openly. It tells me I am moving too quickly, that eagerness is a lack of discipline, that sincerity is something to be rationed. It warns me that I am giving too much of myself away, that love should be approached cautiously, like a contract rather than an experience. I listen, because I have lived long enough to know the world is not always wrong. And still, I find myself resisting it.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4uaoLOKQZCMuRxJedQvOrv?si=eayJm-LJTeif0sjc-GSVow

I am afraid—not in the way of panic, but in the way of awareness. I know what is possible here. I know how deeply my heart can break. I know the cost of choosing wrong. But I also know the cost of choosing nothing. I know what it means to stand at the edge of feeling and refuse to step forward out of fear. That, too, leaves its own kind of damage.

Because I am falling in love with you. Not dramatically. Not carelessly. But with intention, with attention, with the quiet seriousness that comes from having loved before. It does not feel like the rush of first love, blind and consuming. Nor does it feel like the guarded affection of a heart still bleeding. It feels steadier than both. Clearer. Like something that understands what it is risking and decides, nonetheless, to proceed.

It shows itself in small ways. In the way we speak without effort. In the way silence between us does not need to be filled. In the way the world seems to soften when you are near, as though it recognizes something it does not wish to disturb. There is no urgency here, no need to hurry the future into place. Only a quiet sense of alignment that is difficult to explain and harder to dismiss.

So I ask myself why caution is so loudly advised. Why there are rules for falling in love, drawn by those who survived their own heartbreaks and mistook survival for wisdom. Why mistakes are treated as failures rather than as proof of having lived honestly. Why the heart is expected to be obedient when it has never been that kind of organ.

Why can’t I make my own mistakes? Why must I protect myself so thoroughly that I am untouched by the very thing that makes life expansive? Why must I live carefully when love has never rewarded carefulness alone?

You know, it’s funny how life works. How love arrives not as a demand, but as an invitation. How it asks not for certainty, but for courage. How it calls even to hearts that know the cost of answering.

And even knowing this—knowing what the sea can take—I still find myself standing at its edge, listening.

Because some loves are not meant to be avoided. They are meant to be entered, with eyes open and heart intact, even if they change us in ways we cannot yet name.

~Emma🦋