You Have a Match

by Emma Lord

If you learn to capture a feeling, he told me, it’ll always be louder than words.

Words always fell short. Made the feeling cheap. Some things, I think, there weren’t supposed to be words for at all.

I breathe in the sticky warmth of the air, the pine and the electricity and the ache of something deeper than I can name, knowing that no view I can capture will ever compare to this feeling—seeing it through my eyes while seeing it through his, letting us both bleed into a world where those two things can be the same.

“Love makes you do things you never thought you would.”

I think in life you can know you’re loved without peering too closely at the edges of it. It’s almost scary, seeing that there aren’t any—it doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It just kind of is.

Our eyes meet and the moment stamps itself to my heart, taking up a permanent place in me before it’s over, and I hear Poppy’s voice in my head—If you learn to capture a feeling, it’ll always be louder than words.