I'm Adely Moe and this is The Slowdown.

When I first started writing love poems, they terrified me.

More than poems about politics or rage or trauma or pain, the poems that talk about love

or surrender to love felt, to say the least, risky.

They felt risky because who among us hasn't had love end?

I've had love end and been aroundly destroyed by it.

Even when I was young and newly acquainted with the ways of the world, it seemed utterly

impossible that love could end, and yet it did.

Here was the question that troubled me.

Where does love go when it ends?

And of course, the bigger question, how can you ever surrender to love again if you

know that it can dissolve, break, burst into flames?

So when I finally did love again and surrendered to it, writing about it felt like jumping

off the high dive.

What if you wrote a love poem and then the love fell apart the next month?

No one knows the future, no one could hold on to anything forever.

The way that I could finally lean into it, move through the idea of writing about love

and desire, was to allow the poem to be what it is right then in the moment, and stop

catastrophizing about what could go wrong with it in the future.

What I had to admit to myself was that if I was going to be hurt down the road, I was

willing to be hurt to experience this moment of love, this moment of complete joy.

Now tell me that's not terrifying.

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