Vivid
The Cost of Intensity
Ever wonder why love and anger are associated with shades of the same color?
Love, a fresh-cut rose in full bloom, while anger seethes hot as embers in a furnace.
But does love have to crush you like a stack of bricks?
Does it always ache until it bleeds you dry?
Maybe it’s soft as walking on a fresh-cut lawn on a spring evening.
When it’s new, a dewy patch of clover in the still morning light.
Sometimes it’s the forming rainclouds over dusty gravel roads.
When you just want to be together, but you have to go to work.
It can blind you like a sunbeam through the kitchen window,
Or beam like a sprinkle of daisies you notice at the park.
It can bruise and swell when you’re smacked with betrayal and lies.
When it hurts to think, so you hold tight to the bottle as you try to wash it all down.
Gets dark as midnight when it’s too quiet to sleep because the future is shaky,
And you can feel the void stretching its mouth just wide enough to envelop you.
Maybe after all that, if you’re lucky, it can blush with hope as you agree
To start again from scratch, hopefully make a stronger one this time.
The roaring flame isn’t love so much as passion. Can’t have love, anger,
Fear, or even hatred, without catching a few burns from it.
But if you don’t have passion…
…what’s it even worth?