Black Ink and Parchment

Love is not soft or simple, but distant, burning, gravitational. Something you don’t hold so much as witness. Something that pulls, even when you try to stand still. People try to simplify it, saying love is this or that. But like the planets themselves, they all have unique characteristics, pulls, and orbits. The hardest part of it is that we might be mismatched when we meet, in a different planet era, if you will. For example, Earth might meet up with Mercury, or Jupiter and Pluto might collide. Timing is everything, so when our planets line up, enjoy watching the sky spin.

Mercury
Some people pass through your life so fast you don’t even realize they were there until the space they leave behind cools. They come and go like a thought you almost remembered, then return just long enough to remind you how easily something can slip through your hands.

Venus
This is the love you don’t rush. You stand in it, quietly, like sunlight through lace curtains. It’s admiration more than anything else. You don’t really understand it, so you make it celestial. This type of love inspires poetry, art, and music. An immortal love that is far better in art than in reality.

Earth
Some loves feel like they’ve been growing long before you arrived. You don’t have to tend or trim them. They know who they are and have been waiting for you to join them in this Eden. Love that feels like home even when you’ve never seen it before. When two Earth souls meet at the right time, it is astronomical.

Mars
This love takes. It burns so hot that it forgets what it’s touching. There’s a thin line between intensity and ruin, and Mars never cared to learn the difference. It calls destruction devotion and dares you to disagree. While passionate, it can hurt.

Jupiter
Some people reshape your world. They pull everything closer, whether it belongs to them or not. We orbit them. You love to be in their line of vision, but then you realize other people are circling them and in your need to win their gaze, you forget where you end and they begin.

Saturn
Saturn, like love, is distance dressed up as destiny. It’s beautiful in a way that aches, both untouchable and inevitable. You will fall so hard, but they won’t get you a place to land. You want to dance on the rings with them, but then you realize they are not solid, but made of ice and dust. While Saturn has the illusion of destiny, it cannot be anything but temporary.

Uranus
This is the love that tilts everything sideways. Nothing fits the way it used to because it disrupts, distorts, and rearranges. Your world is tumbling, and even in the chaos, you can’t leave. You know this love is all wrong for you and shouldn’t have to rearrange your entire life to make it fit. Love shouldn’t be a disaster to make you feel alive.

Neptune
Some loves are oceans with no shore. You can drown in them without ever touching the bottom. You can barely keep sailing, and you know they have so much more below, but you are afraid to dive deeper. What if you cannot come back up? Or worse, what if you don’t like what you see below? Deep love is endless, but dangerous if you don’t know what swims below the surface.

Pluto
There are people you think you’ve left behind until a memory, a feeling, a quiet, inexplicable ache pulls at you. Not strong enough to bring them back, but enough to remind you they never fully left. They will always have a piece, no matter how far they travel or how long it’s been. Pluto stole a grain of your heart, and it will always make you feel like something is missing.

Love is vast and confusing. Maybe that’s why we keep trying to name it after planets, after skies, after anything bigger than ourselves. Because if love is a universe, then at least it makes sense that we feel so small inside it.