What We Rarely Admit
This poem was written as a response to a prompt by Carolyn Jones in an ongoing writing experiment called "The Opportunity," which appeared on her publication, Words in Bloom. The prompt was "What does love ask of us that we rarely admit?" It appeared in the February 1, 2026 edition of Words in Bloom. Love asks that we risk being the one who reaches, being the one who names it, being the one who needs. What we rarely admit is this: love does not only want our hearts, it wants our hands. It wants us to show up as if the days matter, as if a life can be built from the honest repetition of choosing. Again. Again. Again. Not forever as a promise, but forever as a practice. And yes, it asks for the terrifying miracle: to let someone touch the parts of us we’ve been calling “unlovable,” and call them home.


I may have posted this already, but there's a wonderful line supposedly written by Louise Colet to Flaubert: "We do not choose--we are elected into love."
Wisdom and truth, Paul. This landed in my heart, especially this very day when I needed to read it.