We Forgot How to Fall

I want to be so in love my knees hurt.

The inconvenient, all-consuming, completely irrational kind. The kind that seems impossible on paper. I know the movies aren’t real. I want it anyway.

We have confused options with freedom. We are so busy not catching feelings that we have forgotten what it feels like to simply… feel. We swipe past people we might have loved because the next one is one scroll away. We protect ourselves so carefully from being hurt that we have accidentally protected ourselves from being known.

The armor works. You won’t get hurt. You also won’t get anything else.

Love is not a feeling you fall into and float in forever. It is a partnership. A choice. In sickness and health and bad days and staying anyway. It asks something of you. It costs something. That used to be understood. Somewhere between the apps and the options and the endless optimization of our own lives, we decided the cost was too high. We forgot that the cost is the point.

I want the cost. I want to be changed by someone. I want evidence, in the form of a person, that I let someone all the way in. I want to fight and mean it when I say sorry. I want the extraordinary, the inside jokes, the quiet that feels like home, Shabbat on Friday nights with people we made together.

I am a hopeless romantic in a generation that finds hope cringe. In a generation that judges people for going after what they want. Where wanting something so badly is embarrassing, and needing someone is weakness, and loving first is the most dangerous thing you can do.

I know love exists. I have seen it.

And somehow, in a world that has made wanting this feel naive. I still want it. All of it. The inconvenience. The irrationality. The consequences.