This is the kind of love people run away from, build up walls to protect themselves against. This is the kind of love that overtakes the runner and tears down the walls, that penetrates the heart and puts everything else in its rightful place.

This is the kind of love I felt when The Husband and I first got together and I knew–here was the one who would stick. I boarded the plane home and, for the first time, didn’t like to fly. We hit turbulence and I thought of all I would miss, all I would lose if we didn’t stay in the air. I realized that, if I gave in to this kind of love, I would always be a target for that kind of fear.

This is the kind of love that transforms the nature of a cry from simply annoying to heart-rending. This is the kind of love that laughs at jokes that are amateur at best, knock-knocks that don’t even make sense. This kind of love wears its vomit on its sleeve, picks noses with clean fingernails, distributes kisses like water. This love takes too many pictures and overposts them. This love squeals with delight over one coo, over a half-smile. This love studies hair whorls and tiny toes and notices the slightest red spot on skin or difference in stool patterns. This love turns long nights at the bar into long nights at the crib. This love turns the next-day hangover into the next-day exhausted stupor–not much different except for the lack of toilet-hugging, it turns out. This love makes me over into the cheesy, baby-talking mess I always secretly laughed at in others. This love renders a monitor screen into a movie screen, where a static picture becomes an engrossing image.

This love is equal parts pain and joy, frustration and accomplishment, exhausting and invigorating. This love is terrifying. This love is fluent in the language of sacrifice, the dialect passed down perfectly by only one, giving and giving and giving without waiting for return.

This love is the only kind worth living for.