I have talked to many, to try to find the answer to the question that everyone asks. I have asked the young and the old, those that have had it and lost it and those that still claim what is most precious to them. Love. What is it? I found the answer in the most unlikely of places: A young women, well, that is to say, she was not old enough to be a woman yet not young enough to be a child. She was so very wise, so very mature for her young years. I wondered at why she should have what I sought. Of all, her answer was the best. And this is what she said:
Love? Love is when you can not stand to be away from the person, though you know you must. You bide your time and you will wait until the world stops spinning for that one person to come back to you. Every day and every night you think of him, yet it is not every minute, for if it were every minute then it would not last and this feeling you claim as “love” is known simply as “infatuation”.
You can see faults in them, yet you think it is what makes them perfect. It is these little misgivings that have caused you to fall in love with them in the first place. They are perfect to you, in every single way; they are the most beautiful person you have ever seen and you know that you can never find another like them. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder they say, and how true it is that your true love will be the most beautiful one in the world.
Fights will happen. It is only natural. It is healthy. It is what keeps the spirit alive, little arguments. Of course, this must not be mistaken for large fights where people will get hurt from it, where they will feel that they do not love the other; this, too, can prove infatuation, that or disillusionment.
Love is a gentle smile, a soft kiss; passionate nights and playful teasing. It is all of the emotions rolled into two people. They know exactly if the other is truly mad or only jesting, how to take certain things spoken. Love is two people wrapped up in one another’s arms for comfort, for warmth. It is two halves brought together to make the whole.
Love is two elderly people, sitting next to one another as their days grow closer. Two people who have the same feelings for each other that they had seventy years before.
Love is, above all else (the young women concluded with a sigh), a thing which is tested by time and distance, by obstacles, though if it is truly love, then it was destined by the gods and no matter how much time two people must wait, they have one another, always, in their minds and hearts.
And so I had listened to her, in great entrancement, as she spoke these words to me. I wondered how one so young could know such words and so I asked her this. She just shrugged her shoulders as she looked across the fields, across the sky, to a million miles away. That was all she gave me for an answer and I knew that that would be all that I would get. I stood up and I b id her adieu, to leave her in peace. As I left, I glanced over at her and saw as she played with a small ring encircling her finger, tears gathering in her eyes and I knew then at that moment how she knew what this word meant while everyone else I had asked merely stumbled over words, sometimes making a little sense: She had experienced love.