word nerd

i'm fascinated by words. i love how you can take letters to form a word. combine words together and you've got a sentence. combine a few sentences together and you've got a paragraph. i love how words can speak to multiple people at one time. you read a quote or listen to song lyrics and it's like that person knows you and your situation and wrote that quote or those lyrics just for you. it's also amazing to me how you can hear a song a million times, even know all the words, but then you experience something in your life and the song takes on a whole new meaning, or you finally understand what the singer is singing about.

i have a friend who gave me this quote a while back. i've been wanting to post it for a while but not quite sure how to fit it into anything. i suppose i should have placed it in my valentine's post, but now is a good time as any. so, here, i share some of my favorite letters that make sentences that have formed a paragraph that i love because it is so so true.

"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of these loveable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really, want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."
— Chuck Klosterman (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)