Worth the Crash

Everything carries risk.
Every shared smile, every shed tear
lays your heart bare on the runway,
engines hot, no retreat.

Some navigate low and cautious
trimming the throttle on vulnerability,
dodging crosswinds of the uncontrollable,
banking hard away from those who care too much,
hold too long, love too deep.

But love has no safe altitude.
No checklist. No reserve fuel.
You can’t arm yourself against it.
It doesn’t ask permission and it sure as hell
doesn’t care if you turn away.

Love is the greatest risk in the book
unreliable, unsentimental, merciless.
It drops the strongest pilots,
knees buckling at ten thousand feet.

In the best of times it still hurts:
the ache of needing, the burn of belonging,
the hollow silence of flying solo.
The risk never fades. It sharpens with every hour logged.

Love is total surrender
no ejection seat, no chute.
Weak or strong, willing or captured,
you feel it anyway.

Yet for all the things love is not,
what it IS outweighs them tenfold.

Love is surrender with eyes wide open
a gift that costs everything.
It burns through every thought, every breath,
every last drop of fuel you thought you were saving.

It is the fire that makes you climb higher,
push harder, refuse to merely pass through this life.
It dares you to live.

No matter how it ends
crash or clear skies
once you’ve flown with it,
you are never the same.

It may scar your heart and soul.
It will leave you memories,
some that warm like morning sun on the canopy,
others that cut like ice at altitude.