I’ve always been a massive romantic.  The ideas of everything love could be, fully equipped with the enormous array  of affections and words and cheesiness… yeah, I’m into all that… so I’ve seen the movies and I’ve read the books and I’ve heard the songs. However, the first time I ever saw love played out in front of me.. like really in front of me, wasn’t in some big screen or Nicholas Sparks book. It wasn’t in some Michael Bolton song or Lifetime episode. The first time I saw what love could really really be, what it could do, where it could go, was in the living room of my house one February 4 years ago. My mom was having surgery and the nurses told us to go home and rest because we wouldn’t be able to see her till the morning, and my dad looked like total crap because he had been sleeping on a recliner for 2 weeks and bathing inside the hospital bathrooms with only 3 sets of clothes that he tried to keep mixing up. When we finally got home I sat on the couch and a few minutes later my dad walks out from taking a shower and dressed to leave. I remember asking him where he was going but inside, I just knew. “I’m going to stand at the entrance so I can see her when they move her from surgery to recovery” he told me and literally rushed out the house, scared he might miss her. So there he was… my dad, who isn’t exactly the master of romance and to this day I have to remind him to call his mom for her birthday and I send flowers in his name, driving 30 minutes to be able to see my mom for 2 seconds, and then drive back home. And when she finally got home after surgery and slept on the couch because her bed felt uncomfortable? He slept on the floor. Right next to her. Every. Single. night.  Even the nights she yelled at him and told him to go to the room because she didn’t want him on the floor. Even the nights his back hurt so much he could hardly get 10 minutes in. He wouldn’t go without her. And the one time he did go to the room? She called him in the middle of the night to come back. So that was when I knew how far beautiful love could really go… two people, as polar opposites as they come, because you couldn’t get any more different than my parents, always needing to come back to each other. Not wanting to be somewhere if the other wasn’t there. Not caring about what separated them, because what kept them together was so much stronger.