This is what love is

This is the moment it's all changing, this is the moment I start living and loving, this is what love is.

It's a sticky humid cloudy December Sunday morning. We've been together for about two weeks. I remember so clearly the heat, the way the air smells of rain and coffee and car fumes, the sounds of the street, what I'm wearing, what we talk about, where we park, the shops we go in, what we look at, what we buy, what we eat, what we talk about.

I've never been in love and certainly never believed in love, so I don't understand why I'm feeling this way. I've been such a loner and so fiercely independent for so long, I'm not used to sharing feelings and moments, but then I'm not the person I was two weeks ago.

For the first time in my life I don't have to pretend, I'm not questioning what to do or how to act, I'm not worried about making a fool of myself or giving too much away, it's all just happening. The relief and feeling of freedom is incredible and just so hard to try to describe. I feel real and worthy and whole. It's so bizarre and unexpected and overwhelming.

I need you now to make me me.

A couple of nights later we're lying on my bed eating ice cream out of the tub and we're staring at each other for minutes at a time, saying nothing, but absolutely everything. Everything's different now, you're here in my life and you are my life and I want to stay here with you and spend every minute I can with you. I've never felt so free. You are the other half of me that I've floated years to find. I can't imagine now how I got through every day before without you. I have absolutely no control, and I don't want to. As soppy and cliched as it sounds we both know that it's like something bigger than us has already decided all of this for us, we don't have to try or question or wonder or be afraid, it's all been written and decided. I wasn't looking for you, I wasn't wishing this to happen to me, it just did, and it just was.

If I'd known what it was like to be lucky enough to feel this way I would have searched for love harder and earlier but who knows, looking for it I may have chosen too hastily and mistakenly like so many others.

I didn't have to find you, because you were meant to be, you were always there, I just had to wait.

This is what love is.

Estella