Love is beautiful.I have heard people condemn itThe words slipping from their mouths in a bitter promenadeAs their minds snap back to gnarled endings and jagged promisesBut that is not the fault of love. Love turns ugly when people turn ugly -A weapon as a cheery face grows grotesqueAnd because it is loveIt has no defense against thisSo the world blames it. I will not pretend to know everything about love but I know what it is not. It is not forbidding you to spend time with your friends because you “don’t know how guys work”It is not demanding you spend every waking second with it, and if you don’t, you don’t careIt is not telling you that if you were to die, it would kill itself, and shocked then upset when you admit you would not do the same. People scrawl the word upon ropes and tie each other up,Pointing to the writing, trying to prove that’s what it is. You cannot paint “love” onto a knife and stab someone in the backAnd pretend you are a romantic because Love is not painful betrayal,Love is beautiful. It is a pastel sunrise on an autumn morning, the colors smeared across the sky by a delicate hand,It is freshly washed sheets bundled around you until you are certain you are safe in its wrap,It is music pounding at a concert so loud you feel vibrations in your chest and suddenly you cannot tell the difference between yourself and the love.Yet people still get confused. They see the ropes as a blanket they are being tucked into,And the sunrise behind them reflected in the knife,So let me be a little more clear. It is listening to you talk about your problems without turning them on itself,It is understanding when life gets busy and waits for you regardless,It is telling you when it is upset and trying to hold a conversation instead of an argument,And I wish this hadn’t been so shocking to meAnd that I hadn’t sabotaged my chances for years because I had been conditioned to see love as Manipulating and debilitating and something to be avoided. I shouldn’t be startled when the words I say are respectedOr when I’m not considered an enemy by those of my pastI wish so did not feel like I have to begin every relationship by addressing its endOr wonder if my accomplishments will make someone uncomfortableOr worry about what might go wrong and how it will go wrong and what will happen once everything is wrong. You see, the hands that hold me nowAre so soft that I did not even feel them at firstFor I was used to rough, calloused hands that scraped me when they touched,So understanding, so mature, so selfless that I actually questioned what this was, Because I thought love was gruesome and evil. But it isn’t. Love is beyond hurting you. Love is beautiful.