We get caught up, most of us anyway, in the rules and logic of how things should be. How things were meant to be. We are creatures ruled by emotion but with brains that do everything in their power to press that emotion into shelves and boxes until it all makes sense to us. We’ve written millions of words on love, ad nauseum, trying to turn it into a type of thing you can study, throw under a microscope and hypothesize about – a sort of theory of love.

But of course, there is no such thing. There are no words, no microscope powerful enough to even be able to put a touch of logic and sensible analytics to a thing that is so strong, so fleeting, so intense and so illogical in its very nature. There is no way to look at love through a lens of how things should be – it is an animal all on its own, sometimes scary and sometimes all consuming but certainly uncontrollable and hugely misunderstood.

The trouble comes when we try to take logical thinking and place it on the heart. It’s akin to using a Brazilian dictionary to translate a verse of Japanese – you are ridiculous to think one is going to help the other.

it’s not a test or a trick of the mind, only love

What is should, anyway? How could something be meant to be a certain way if it never was in the first place?
I have never known love, not in the logical, mindful sense anyway. I have only felt it, had the shit beaten out of me by it, knocked over again and again, been pushed and pulled and tossed higher into the sky than I could ever imagine. I have felt it in my breath and in my blood, in the tips of my fingers and the bottom of my stomach.

I have tried without any success to understand it, to force into a box of logic and sensibility for sanity’s sake, if nothing else. But like anyone, I cannot hold it, I cannot contain it, I cannot understand it. It exists with or without me, it does not care what my brain thinks my heart should feel.

In love, there is no should. There only is. And whatever is – is completely unstoppable.