We meet strangers in every possible corner. At the office. On the apps. In the community. There are a million ways people find their way into first dates, into the rhythm of someone else’s day and night. It then blossoms into the giggling, the butterflies, the high, the calmness, and all that bass. Then, there are just as many ways to fall out of love. People return to their old routines. I know some people run marathons. Or move abroad. Or simply get through the days, one by one, hoping time will dull the edges.

For me, I write.

I began writing about love, or what I thought it was, when I was 12. I went to a Catholic school, and almost every morning before class we went to church. I would exchange glances with a boy across the pews, and later, I would write about it. Not much—just what it felt like, sometimes in the form of a fable because I was too shy to write as is. In high school, I wrote about a senior I liked so much that I tweeted embarrassing things just to make him notice. (I think a lot of my seniors noticed, except him. lol.) I wrote about my first heartbreak when it cracked me open. And then my second. And third. And so on. Decades after that first scribble about love, I still write. Less often, but still, because this thing feels too large to capture and too hard to define.

The more I write about it, the more I realize how many forms it takes. Love is many-meaning-ed. It is wild, insistent, and sometimes terrifying. It pulls you from the cool, detached twilight of solitude into the life of another upbringing, another gaze that seems to recognize something of you. Love is the taste of honey and salt, the weight of sun-warmed skin after rain. It is The Song of Songs verses murmured to no one and everyone. Love moves us. Not just across cities or countries, though I have done that too, but in relation to ourselves. It shifts how we see, how we hold, how we act, and how we let go.

Several months ago, I met someone. I saw possibilities in him, and he saw them in me. We both leaned in, one minute and then another, trying to see if what we felt could take root. But it is not always enough, and sometimes two people cannot meet in the middle no matter how much they want to. It’s a funny thing to say I’m sorry it didn’t work— as if relationship were a project and this is a failed experiment we could summarized. But I (we) said it anyway, because at the end of the day, that’s what it was: a set of efforts that could only take us so far.

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I love love in all its forms. I have learned (and am still learning) about the depth of agape love, the endurance of friendship love, or the roots of family love. But romantic love feels like a study for all other kinds of love. Maybe that is why I keep writing about it. Because maybe I will never excel at it, never fully understand its spectrum. I feel the chaos, the range, and the ebb and flow of love are like ink spilled on paper, leaking into every corner, staining in messy shapes but somehow still looking okay-ish when you step back to see it.

Although love has failed me numerous times, or maybe I failed it, it might be the only thing that keeps me going. It is the pulse that drives me to notice, to care, to risk again. Maybe this is just another breakup essay, another attempt to stitch language over the wound.

But I know I will write about love again, as I will love again, as I maybe will lose again.

And each time, I will begin again.