Love's Briar Patch : Krysta Walker

Falling in love for the first time. You don’t even know that you’re doing it. Imagine that you’re falling down a hill, but you feel like you’re floating, so you don’t even know that you’re falling. Not even when you hit the bottom, a pit of roses, do you realize that the roses have thorns. Those thorns are digging into your hips and snagging your hair, but all you feel are smooth kisses, soft touches, light breezes. All you see is a clear blue sky, but you don’t realize that you’re looking up, laying on your back in the mud. All you feel is the sweet summer air floating above your face and you don’t realize that you’re slipping deeper and deeper. You don’t realize until you've rolled all the way to the bottom of the pit and are crawling out. It’s then that you see that you’re covered in cuts and bruises, that you’re cold and bleeding. That the sun is still shining, but the wind is biting. So you’re standing on that hill, barely making it, still you’re standing. And you look back down there, into that pit, and even though you see all those sharp thorns and the mud all over you, even though all of the warmth is gone, you still remember. You still have goose bumps from the breeze. You can still smell the roses. And the worst part about love, the worst and best, the part that gets us all in the end, is that you know that you’d gladly fall down that hill, into the pit and the thorns and the mud, a thousand times more.