(this beautiful piece of writing is an excerpt from the book This Is Me Letting You Go by Heidi Priebe)

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They don’t tell you that love will be work.

That it won’t always be a freely flowing stream of adoration and attention and growth. That sometimes loves will mean choices you don’t want to make and roads to you don’t want to take and that it’s going to be every bit as unglamorous as it is incredible and brave. They don’t tell you that love might make you into a person you don’t want to be. And that you you’re going to have to do a lot of learning if you ever want to grow inside of love.

They don’t tell you that love is addicting.

That it has the inexplicable potential to consume every part of your being and make you forget what that you once wanted in its absence. That you will not always be ready for the world love sweeps you away to and that you’ll lose your own mind and your footing in ways you swore you never would.

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They don’t tell you that love is going to break you.

That someday, every idealistic hope you once had about what it means to give and receive love freely will be shattered in a way you can never fully reconstruct. That no matter how many hearts and hands and futures you hold with someone else after this point, you’ll never get back to the way you once looked at love and hoped that it would manifest for you.

Excerpt from This Is Me Letting You Go

Why Loving Again Is So Painful

Humans learn nothing from history
we teach it in our high schools
and debate about it in university,
but never ever apply it to our lives.

You see, we fall in love,
and when that love leaves,
we panic and give our hearts a shove,
when it’s only just learning to survive.

We keep walking into love again
And again without cauterizing
the wounds and the pain
of our hearts’ last breaking.

This is why loving again
feels like salt on open wounds.
This is why trusting again
feels like bodies made
of old deceit and betrayal
being constantly exhumed.

They don’t tell you that this will eventually be a good thing

That the real, concrete love will eventually overshadow the flimsy, fantasy love you’d constructed in your mind.

They don’t tell you that love is a habit.

That you can fall out of it and become clumsy and awkward and unpracticed at giving and accepting it back.

That you will grow impatient with yourself in the process, wondering why on earth the walls around your heart have grown so high since you last knocked them down. That some old wounds will bleed again at every tender touch and that it’s going to take a while to heal them over. They don’t tell you that love can be forgotten until suddenly, unexpectedly, it’s not. They don’t tell you that once you start back up, love becomes the most impossible habit to break.

They don’t tell you that nobody can tell you the way love is going to feel for you. That it’s an experience so unique to all of us that we’ll never fully understand what we’re getting our- selves into until we find ourselves right in the middle of it.

They don’t tell you that it’s going to be loud and quiet, big and small, fierce and unassuming, proud and shameful, all at once. They don’t tell you what love is going to end up meaning to you, because they can’t.

Because for some things, we still have no words.

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(this beautiful piece of writing is an excerpt from the book This Is Me Letting You Go by Heidi Priebe)

Excerpt from This Is Me Letting You Go