Sweet Nothings

once upon a time, your face was the wallpaper of my phone, held in the embrace of a picture frame, ten seconds before the snapchat disappears but it was okay because a split second of you frozen in time was all i needed to make me smile.  but then we turned the page and now just a glimpse of you in the background of a blurry photograph brings a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach and the next thing i know, i’m bedridden for the rest of the evening because the pain is too much for me to stay standing.

When you’re 12 years old you think you know exactly what love will look like. Love will have blue eyes and a perfect smile and musical laughter. Love will be smooth and funny and will dance with you at every party. Love will play the guitar and sing along to your favorite Beatles songs and cook breakfast for you every morning. Love will carry your groceries and walk you to your door. Love will kiss you in the rain and hold your hand when you’re scared. Love will buy you roses and take you for picnics in the park. Love will be perfect. When you’re 12 years old you think you know exactly what love will look like. But when loves shows up at your door a few years later it is none of these things. You find out that love has brown eyes and a crooked smile and laughs too quietly for you to hear. Love is clumsy and even though love thinks it’s funny, it really isn’t. You laugh anyway. Love dances like it has two left feet and has never picked up a guitar. Love doesn’t listen to the Beatles and can’t cook to save it’s life. And love is so far from perfect. Love is messy and complicated and loud. Love forgets to do the dishes and leaves their laundry all over the house. Love is flawed and raw and nothing like you imagined it would be when you were 12 years old. But love is real, and better than anything you could have dreamed up.

Another flaw in the human character is that everyone wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Then there is the boy you can never stop thinking about. Whenever you see his name, it trips you up. Even if it’s one that belongs to many others, even if he belongs to someone else. You know he is a symbol of your weakness, your Kryptonite. How he rushes in like wildfire and burns through everything you worked so hard to build since he last left you in ashes.

Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.