Love can break your heart. It’s probably in the fine print.
Didn’t you click the box at the bottom of the terms and conditions?
Blessed are you when your kids are ungrateful,
when your parents are unbearable,
or when they would have been if they were still around.
When you help an unfixable friend,
listen much longer than a normal person should,
or give selflessly out of meager resources.
Blessed is your terrible evaluation of who is worth it.
Your cost-benefit analysis would be the laughingstock of any economist.
You ignored the signs: Will this make you richer? Happier? Well rested?
Probably not.
You have been noticing for a while
how these small moments—the privilege of wrapping a blanket
around this love, that friendship, this stranger—are impossible to quantify. Love is adding up to so much more, somehow.
Because blessed are you whose heart has grown three sizes.
Regardless.
You who push through
the fear of intimacy,
the fear of loss,
the fear of all the unknowns,
and choose to love still.
Blessed are we,
loving beyond our limits,
loving when it doesn’t make sense,
loving without any lifetime guarantees,
loving when it might break our hearts.
That is, of course, the best thing about us: our great, big, dumb hearts.
Adapted for a communal setting from THE LIVES WE ACTUALLY HAVE (pg 170)
