"I love you"

"Do you love me?"
She was silent.
"Do you love me?" I asked again, hearing and beginning to fear that my voice was giving away the acceleration of my heart as it thundered towards her silent wall that I knew would crack it.
"Answer me." I said staring at her.
"You know I do."
But in that moment as she said it, I saw the lies slip from her eyes, and a thousand years of automated responses come together in a moment of an ultimately blinding clash.

How many times do you return the words "I love you" with what you think is the polite response. Some try and camouflage it, and ommit words, you know the
"and me, you"
"I do too"
"and you."
Type of responses. You see, nothing is quite the same as the response of "I love you" when you say it to someone, even the "too" to me sometimes sounds oddly rehearsed, as if it was repeated over and over again to convince the speaker of their love. I believe to some extent that when we say it, we shouldn't just be saying it, but feeling the words etched into our very souls as they come from our mouths.

The words "I love you" are used so lightly these days, we say it to almost everyone. Teenage fans saying it to their favorite artists all the time, people dating say it only to hope that by saying it, it would then formulate love, guys say it to get into girls pants, and girls say it so they can go and tell their girlfriends that they're so in love. But what about knowing it, and meaning it?

There are many things I take seriously, and many things I absolutely do not because I feel like we have all these little things we do, and say, in order to keep us going, or to keep the faith. I do, however, take words such as "I promise" and "I love you" seriously. And would you believe that I have never said "I promise" without intending to never break it, and "I love you" unless I really meant it. But I take it that seriously because when someone says those words to me, I believe with my heart that they say it the same way I do, with that same certainty, and without a hint of a lie.

I believe that love is something rational. That right before you say the words, you make a decision that changes "like" to "love", that in fact it is not something that is pressed upon you, but something you've chosen to accept. I've said I love you to few people in my life, and every time I did/do I truly believed that I meant it, but as I lie here now - knowing His love - I must stop and wonder if I did ever truly mean it. I based love on the willingness to jump in front of a bus for someone, but never took into the consideration that I was depressed and wanted to jump in front of a bus anyway. When I said I love you, I based it on how the person made my heart beat faster, which I could have gotten from caffeine or how we'd been together for so long, that I must love them by now. But as I lie here, knowing the names of those I said it to, I'm perfectly okay with never speaking to them. Perfectly okay with never thinking about them, and perfectly okay with the fact that maybe I didn't in fact love them as much as I thought I did, or at all.

I know in my heart that I have loved, and I somewhat feel that my nature, even though I'm not from a very emotional family, is that I am a creature of love. I feel love for people intensely, and very quickly, that I feel blinding over protectiveness and a need to shelter and take care of so many in my life, but to a certain extent it scares me because I don't know if it really is actually love.

We think that we know what love is, but I feel like we have no idea at all, that our emotions have been so confined and boxed by a society that tells us what emotion looks like that we think we have it figured out. But really, when we say "I love you" maybe we have no idea at all.