Love is a strange thing. Now, attraction I can understand. It’s biologic, it had an evolutionary need. Devotion, too, I understand. But love? It can be attraction, it can be devotion, it can be both, it can be neither. It is foreign, seemingly incorrect on so many levels.

Why is it that we fall in love? We love to say love is from the heart, but obviously a giant organ beating blood toward the rest of your body isn’t where that intensity originates. The mind, maybe, but that seems too on the nose.

And is love even intense? You see it on the media all the time, that love equates to passion, sacrifice, theatrics. But then that means I’ve never felt love, and neither has a significant portion of the human population.

From what I’ve observed, love is most often quiet. It’s quiet when I cook you dinner every night, because you couldn’t use a spatula if your life depended on it. It’s quiet when you sit in the yard with your earbuds in, memorizing every word to my new favorite song. It’s quiet at night when we warm both sides of the bed with our bodies, not touching yet forever entwined. It is rarely a sharp stab, more of a dull ache, a soft humming in the back of the mind, but it’s there, it’s always there.

So I believe that love does not originate from any part of the body, yours or mine or hers or his. It simply _is. _It sits in the air, never leaving or fading, forever present wherever one goes. It’s just that we don’t notice it until we want to, and when we want to, we say we’re in love.