How do you know?

How do you know you love someone? When you say it? When you feel that familiar tingle on your spine? A strange mixture of exhilaration and fear mingled within your body? Or is it when the thousands of small butterflies begin to flutter wildly in your stomach? Threatening to lift you from the ground and carry you far above the world into the sky. Filling you with so much joy that you think you’ll never come down. Do you know you're in love when, upon seeing them, the whole world goes numb, and nothing else matters? You're lost in a day dream clouded daze, and you wander blindly. You fall into a darkness that is lit only by them. They are your lamp and your way, and you follow them out of this daze and into the light, and you see their face and behold it in an unparalleled glory. Is it when you are drawn to them by an unseen force, such as the most powerful magnet on the face of the planet, and nothing can stop your attraction that you know you’re in love? Is it when you long, above all things to hold them in your arms, or feel the touch of their hand on yours? Do you know you're in love, when all you want is to passionately kiss them, caressing their lips with yours, softly and sweetly tasting them and showing your desire? Entangling one another in a great collision of bodies, where two become one, and cannot be found to be separate. Or does this great moment of revelation come perhaps, when you know above all other things in the world, you would sacrifice anything, give up the very air you breathe, stop the beating of your own heart, to see this person happy. When, even if it were to leave you breathless and still in the dirt, you would run to then ends of the earth to see them smile or to hear them laugh? Does this treat realization come when you understand you would sacrifice your own soul to save theirs? When you would do anything and everything to make them love you as you do? When do you know you're in love? When you say it? Three simple words, eight letters. I love you. Or does the answer come when love is no longer a trivial emotion, that simple words cannot express the ways that you feel. I love you, I adore you, worship you, none of these are adequate! You not only love this person, you breathe them, you hear them, you speak them, and you feel them. They course through your veins and run through your mind they are within you and they are a part of you! THIS is love, THIS is passion, and THIS is truth. So, when do you know you love someone? When you say it? No, you know you love someone when you can say, without a doubt in your mind, "I cannot live without this person, they are a part of me and without them, I'm not whole." this, is when you know you're in love.