There is Love in the Smallest Things
The stray eyelash plucked so softly off their cheek, collars adjusted mid-sentence, passing the dishes across the dinner table, eating food from the same plate, a quick hug. Love is not born in grand gestures and proclamations. Love is not an everlasting performance. It is a release of control, it is placing your faith in your loved ones and trusting them. To love and be loved is to rest.
It took me a long time to realise that real intimacy comes from the knowing of things that are only to be discovered through the sharing of mundanity, insights that are only to be glimpsed over the sharing of breakfast, perhaps. Seeing the shape of a person by how they take their tea, the way they spread the nutella on their bread, how they cut fruits. It is the small magic of the mundane, the overlooked.
Love is stored in the way my mother braids my hair at random. It is stored in the way my best friend and I link arms as we walk around the school during free lessons, in the way she brushes off the dirt from my trouser when we head back to class after a pe lesson. It is stored in the handwritten letter my classmate gave me for my birthday. It is stored in the way I pick which shirt my father should wear to an office party.
Being individuals, together, is so incredibly beautiful to me. I am suddenly reminded of how delicate, how fragile all of it is. Whenever I feel insignificant, I think about how vast and endless the universe is. It is infinite to the point where we cannot grasp the very concept of it. Yet how intricate and wonderfully arbitrary it must be for two people’s hands to fit together, your face fits right in the crook of your partner’s neck, the way humans are meant to hold each other. How beautifully accidental it must be for us to have favourite songs, to leave our footprints in the sand at the beach, to share clementines with each other. Existence is miraculous and we are here and we are small and coincidental and there is love. It is quiet, it is subtle, and it is enough.
