Iridescent love.

"But every once in a while, you find someone who's iridescent, and nothing else can compare." ~ Wendelin Van Draanen

Sometimes there's that one person that stands out and shines brighter than everyone else. They make you feel like you could go anywhere and do anything. They make you feel content to sit in one place for hours with them beside you and talk about everything or nothing at all. They speak the language you never knew you needed desperately to hear. When you're with them, things make sense. When you're passionate about something, you see that passion reflected and magnified in their eyes. When you hear a song, or read a book, or watch a movie that moves you deeply, they are the person you want to share it with.

If I ever fall in love, it will be with someone iridescent. I'm not a sappy, gooey, happily-ever-after romantic. I don't want a perfect, all-tied-up-with-a-bow little love story. If I fall in love, I want it to be the kind of love that moves mountains, that both breaks me down completely and puts me back together again, that both shatters my world and makes it worth living. I want the kind of love that's achingly brilliant, painfully intense, agonizingly beautiful.

I don't need it to include extraordinary circumstances or events. The Titanic doesn't need to sink and the Montagues and Capulets don't need to be feuding. I just want the love to be extraordinary.

Maybe that's just as unrealistic as the fairytale-perfect love story. But I try to be a realist about love. Love isn't easy. Love isn't perfect. True love is painful and hard. But to go through that pain with someone by your side who loves everything about you and is willing to go through it all just to be with you? That's so much better than a love that's "easy."

I crave that iridescent, painful, beautiful, life-changing love. But I'm also terrified of it. I'm terrified of not finding it, of realizing that my dreams are just foolish castles in the clouds. I'm terrified of finding it, and not being able to handle it. I'm terrified of loving someone like this, and them not loving me back.

But still, this is my dream. Of course, there's so much more that's necessary. I want someone who accepts my flaws and loves me through my failures, who can point me to Christ, who will buy me flowers for no reason and read poetry to me. But ultimately, I want to fall in love with someone iridescent.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

~ Sonnet 116, Shakespeare 

Love,
Amanda