what I thought I knew about love

Life is difficult at times, and love more so. As a child love is easy. I love you are words you say to your mom dad and various other family members, or something you tell an elementary school sweetheart you think is cute. Growing up love becomes an entire headache all it's own. The problem we run into, or at least I have my whole life is you forget what you learned as a kid. When you're little you don't have to have someone show you they love you by "doing" anything out of the way, out of the ordinary, or spectacular.  Love is shown through small acts of kindness from others. Maybe it's  a simple I love you, or maybe it's your mom playing with you after a long day of work, maybe it's your dad letting you  watch him work on a car, or watching a ball game with him. Maybe it's family night, or special traditions started at holidays... The point is there is no label for what love is. When you grow up and get your idea of what love is and what it should be, or how it should be expressed we get messed up. Maybe to me love is finding a girl, committing to her, flooding her with attention, coming up with poetry, songs, and gestures to show her what i'm feeling. Maybe her idea of showing you is to move closer to you, and spend her one free day a week having dinner with you as opposed to a girls night out, or maybe it's just to say "I love you" when it's always been so hard for her to say. Or maybe it's to let you see sides of her no one has.  Or maybe it's a father asking you out to breakfast on the weekends just to spend time with you, or taking you out shopping with him, or a mother coming to see you as often as she can, or a brother who comes over to watch ball games or have dinners with you just so he can spend some time with you. The thing is somewhere along the way, we all turn our own ideas of love into the world, and think our expressions are what everyone's expression should be.  Love is shown by men and women fighting for our country, by small kisses, and long talks, leaps and bounds above what others believe and   what others see... Far be it from me to go on a religious rant, but after all, look what Jesus did to show us his love for us... So to those of you who read this, I hope you'll tell the person you love that you do love them... even if it's just by simply dropping by to see them in a moment of spare time, or making a phone call when you usually don't. After all who doesn't need love in their life?