And though the mind may argue, though the hands may labor, the heart remains unmoved, stubborn and unrelenting.
In the end, we are all at its mercy.

If you do not love someone at first sight, you will never truly love them. I do not say this lightly, nor do I wish it to be true. But the heart, I have found, is unyielding in its judgments. It knows, from the very first moment, what it wants and what it cannot abide.

But I cannot help but feel that for some, the search is futile, the building a doomed endeavor.

Is it better to settle for a quiet companionship or to sit alone in the dark, waiting for a lightning strike that may never come?

And yet, there is a cruelty in this truth. For if love must be found in an instant, then what of those of us who never find it? Are we condemned to a life of shadows, of connections that feel more like compromises?

This belief, (grim may be) has come to feel like a universal law. Love is either instantaneous or it is illusory. To deny this is to cling to false hope, to tether oneself to something that will never truly take root. It is a bitter realization, but a strange kind of clarity

To love someone without first being struck by them, without that immediate recognition, is to build a house on a foundation of sand. The structure may hold for a time, but it is always vulnerable, always waiting for the tide to sweep it away.

But now, I find myself haunted by his words. There was no hesitation in him, no questioning or struggle. He loved her as naturally as one breathes, and that love shaped everything that followed.

I remember a friend once told me he loved his girlfriend the moment he saw her. At the time, I dismissed him, thought it was a romantic exaggeration of a man too lucky to know the weight of doubt.

Perhaps love, real love, arrives like a storm. It does not wait patiently or ask permission; it crashes through, displacing everything in its path. It is not built—it is found, like a wild, untamed thing, and if it is not there in the beginning, it cannot be summoned later.

The notion that love can be constructed brick by brick, piece by piece, feels like a polite lie, whispered to comfort those of us who never found it in a glance.

Love, we are told, is a thing that grows. We are encouraged to nurture it, to coax it into being as though it were a fragile plant requiring careful tending. Yet my life, littered with missteps and empty affections, tells me otherwise.