If you love someone, you should probably tell them. It’s not enough to hope they’ll be able to see it in your eyes, or feel it in the lines of your bare palms, because hope, like so many other things, doesn’t equate to reality. But you have to feel those three words first, and not just in the skin-level sense of the word. You have to feel them so deeply they go beneath the epidermis and into the muscle, through the muscle and into the blood and marrow. They have to burrow themselves in every cell and spread so rapidly and so far that everything is immersed in them, like the tectonic plates of Pangaea sinking slowly into the depths of the ocean.
If you love someone, you should probably tell them. Maybe you’re scared or anxious or nervous or terrified, or a dozen other versions of that first word. Maybe your fierce pride is keeping you from admitting the fact that deep down, in the furthest and sharpest stalactites of your ice-cold heart, it’s beginning to melt a little bit. Or maybe you have that very rare, unfortunate problem of projectile-vomiting right as you’re about to say something very profound and deeply moving. Either way, the terror of saying those three tiny yet hugely intimidating words is significantly smaller than the immense terror of falling in love, and you’ve already cleared that hurdle. Compared to falling in love, which is like bungee jumping into an infinite abyss filled with the flames of hell and the deepest pits of Arctic ice combined, saying I Love You is like falling into that same abyss, only there’s no ice or fire and it’s actually finite.
If you love someone, you should probably tell them. After all, the universe isn’t static. Things can change. Even if they reject your feelings outright, you still have time to win them over. Or if victory isn’t your thing, then maybe it’s time for you to move on and find someone else. After all, at any given moment in time, the fabric of the universe is constantly stretching and shifting and lifting, re-folding itself and tucking in its corners in thousands of complex new ways, thereby generating thousands of possible new combinations of individuals for you to fall in love with instead. And falling in love more than once, whether it’s only twice or three times or even four hundred and fifty times, is better than falling in love a single time because the feeling is magnified. You get to experience the first time all over again. So even if you tell someone you love them and it doesn’t work out, there are still so many more chances left to take.
If you love someone, you should probably tell them. You could dramatically alter the course of your entire life. Just like the night sky contains billions and billions of stars, supernovas, black holes, red dwarfs, you name it- those three words could change billions and billions of aspects of your life, no matter how minuscule or mundane some of them are. Instead of waking up alone to an empty house, eating cold cereal or lukewarm toast with congealed butter in ugly grey slippers by yourself in the kitchen, you could wake up next to the only person you’ve ever loved in your entire life, buried in the warmth of their neck, and end up eating breakfast in bed with them, spilling crumbs all over the sheets you’ll later have slow, lazy morning sex on. If you tell the person you love that you love them, maybe you won’t be afflicted by winter depression anymore because this person’s love will warm you up, or you’ll finally have someone to come home to, or maybe you’ll even end up smiling at least one more time a day than you usually do.
If you love someone, you should probably tell them. Because maybe, just maybe, they’re in love with you too.