I always wanted my life to be like a movie.

When I was five: kaleidoscopes of transforming pumpkins swirling before my gemstone eyes, metamorphosing pearl carriages ready to take Cinderella to meet her saving Prince Charming. Animated, talking mice that sewed you dazzling ball gowns – sparkling with crystals along the draped skirt – and nuzzled their tiny snouts into your dainty hands.

When I was thirteen: I fantasized of being one of those manic teenagers, who sat with her best friend on sloping rooftops and got drunk on laughter. Happiness burning as it slid down my throat and contentment blurring my vision.

When I was eighteen, and I abandoned the notion of needing anybody else altogether. I swapped dreams of falling in love and living happily ever after to falling in love with life. Falling in love with myself. A force of nature that left only a trail of destruction in my wake. I spat on films that ended in love and devoured those about self-discovery and self-fulfilment. I craved them the way an addict yearns for their dependence.

My life is not a movie.

Light does not shine gently on my face when I smile. My teeth will always be tinged yellow and my lips, more often than not, are littered with the tiniest of threatening cracks. Soft, blue-inducing music does not play at all the appropriate times, and not every word I utter is going to be poignantly poetic or infinitely quotable.

Love isn't just soft and inviting like they say. Love doesn't only curl you up in its fuzzy, fluffy arms and whisper sweet assurances of how everything is going to be okay. Love is also cruel and has teeth that bite, but it is real and true.

Love splices your ribs open, grabs hold of your pumping heart and shouts into its quivering ear, who are you beating for?

Love is selflessness and selfishness. Happiness and heart wrenching sadness. Love is the full spectrum of human emotion.

And with love, comes the realization that movies are bullshit; I'll take this love – made of sunshine and thunderstorms and rapturous side-aching, breath-catching, laughter-exhausting whirlwinds – any day. May this love swallow me whole and enlighten me with the truth about living.

Smoking doesn't make me mysterious and special; it makes my death that little bit more pertinent. It speeds up my inexorable expiration.

I fling my box of cigarettes onto the ground, crushing the turquoise-lined carton under the grimy heel of my boot. The snowy paper disintegrates into blackening tar and sickly arsenic, muddling into pathetic nothingness. I feel myself heave as I think of all the time I've wasted, mindlessly hurtling myself towards my own end.

I've spent too many years glorifying this socially accepted form of suicide. I've spent too many years taking time away from the precious minute amount I was given.

Ever since I met him, I had begun wishing.

For more time.

My hands stink of nicotine – there is nothing sweet or melancholy or poetic about smoking. The tendrils of smoulders twirling up your face is not an excruciatingly beautiful sight; it is just death cackling as it knows how much you love it. Smoking just speeds up my inevitable demise, and heaven and hell and whatever else in between knows how torturously obsessed I am with that.

I quit, I yell from beneath my lungs, the words drenching my buzzing brain. Water taking to paper.

Being wild and free does not mean drifting from place to place like a nomad. It means fully appreciating every little thing that comes your way; it means not depriving yourself of happiness when it comes.

Loving yourself does not mean leaving no space to love anyone else. It does not mean endlessly protecting yourself by shutting everybody out. Loving yourself is being brave in the face of fear; of being able to say, you can go ahead and try to break me if you want. I dare you. But I should have you know, I fell in love with myself a long time ago, and that makes me indestructible.

Nothing binds me. I choose whether I get hurt. I leave before being left.

I decide.

And here I am: deciding I choose him. And if that means the gamble of falling in love, of having my beating heart split open and the bloody carcass left for vultures, then I choose him over anything.

I am deeply flawed. And I've come to embrace that; I've known for a long time that there is nothing enchanting about being perfect. Perfect is boring, and I loathe boring.

And he, he loved every single one of my flaws from the very moment we met. His demons came out to play with mine, and we found that they got so caught up frolicking together, we could finally find respite in one another's presence.

I've always been the one to make myself happy. A bird sitting on a branch doesn't fear it breaking, because it can fly off and save itself anytime it wants. But it sits on the branch anyway; because it's tired. It's tired of always running, of always closing itself off from the slightest hint of emotion.

Here is the truth: Chase is my resting place. I have handed him my crumbling rose petal innards, and this is what he says: you're safe with me.

I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what I do.

With Chase, he made me feel like I could recreate myself. I could be anyone I wanted to be. I could stop living in pretentious apathy and embrace peace and kindness and light and me.

Indifference and holding back is not bewitching. Being an enigma is not an achievement. Being an enigma drives wedges between other people and you; between who you are and who you pretend to be. Life is meant to be saturated with passion, brimming with uninhibited candour and iridescent openness.

Maybe it won't work out. Maybe it will be completely out of my control, and it will wither in my hands no matter how hard I try to cling onto it.

But I will fight for it.

You can't pray for a celestial love and live telestially. It won't always be amazing and exhilarating and whimsical. Some days, it will need work. Towing the fields with your bare hands and sowing seeds of I've seen you at your lowest point, your miserable wallowing worst, pitiful and dirty, sorrowful and shamed.

And I still love you.

This is what I know about faith.

And, maybe, seeing if it does work out will be the best adventure ever.

I look up and wonder if we're looking at the same sky. The clouds pass overhead, cottony and painted glowing vermillion, the colour of his hair when it hits the sunlight.

I say, 'it hits the sunlight,' and not, 'the sunlight hits it,' because that's the way I see it. I am not terrified of being honest anymore. I crave it. And he gives it to me.

I gaze longingly at the molten orb, and trace my tough fingertips against its blinding countours. To hell with self-inflicted pain. Why am I denying the both of us the chance at something truly great?

I smile, elation racing in my heart. It's not fragile and pieced together from fragmented porcelain anymore – it never has been. Loving yourself first deems your heart ironclad, spilling with love waiting to be shared with others.

I say to the sun, tell me about the big bang.

The sun breathes, it hurts to become.

I know now: this is not my destruction. This is my birth.

There is absolutely nothing mesmeric about being able to detonate any second, leaving corpses and shrapnel in your wake. Anybody can do that. True strength is being able to stay soft in the face of adversity; when the whole world can't get out of bed, you still hum and radiate kindness.

His face manifests in my mind, the one whose soul must be very old friends with mine, and his silk lips part to whisper.

Come back.

I beam exultantly, as every last doubt I have dissipates into the early spring air, and I finally, finally give in.

Disclaimer: I do not own 'What I Know About Faith,' 'The Night Circus' by Erin Morgenstern or Andrea Gibson's work.