Writing prompt for National Poetry Month, April 2017: How do you know you're in love?

Question: 

How do you know you're in love? How many times have you been in love, and how many precious memories do you still have? If you could turn back the hands of time and if you could relive the moments of being in love, how would you describe that love?

Process:

Writing a short narrative or a prose poem is a good place to start writing if you're not an experienced poet. You spend less time thinking and more time just writing, relaxing and allowing thoughts to flow.

Example in prose:

My first love is not easy to determine because it just is not, but the way to write anything is to keep writing for three to five minutes, allowing the mind to free-flow, while trying to keep the question in your mind. Let's see...I had a boyfriend who loved me but then I had a fiance whom I thought I  loved until he hit me in a state of jealousy and nearly broke my jaw. It crackled for months. In the whole scheme of things, my first love seemed to love me about as much as he loved himself, which wasn't enough for either of us, so it didn't last, but I think that might have been an instance of true love. I'm writing freely right now, but I want to stop or I might be forced to cover evidence, and that's not the point of writing at all, at least not when the purpose of the writing is to get the creativity flowing. So I'll stop with this, but I wrote a poem earlier, a poem which is more a series of questions than anything else. If I planned to write a longer poem, I would focus on something in the poem--the emotion, the images, the message and I'd build upon that. The trick is to start where you are and continue writing without worry, without erasing, and without stopping. After getting started you can continue. Once you think the writing is finished, you can go back and add whatever you think the writing needs. An example of poetry writing follows:

Example in poetry:

How do you know when you love someone?
After you've seen their face or smelt the musk
Of a hard day's work and thought,
How beautiful? Or is it much simpler,
Like how your entire soul cringes
When they say hello or good night?
Or is it how you take flight,
Fearing a heavenly
Lock down?
                          (c) by Mjia Johnson 2017