sarjh

“Your first love gets you raw and open and naive and strong. Your first love gets the secrets that you never even knew you were meant to keep buried away. Your first love teaches you that love isn’t about reckless kissing and hands all over the place, that it’s actually about learning and understanding and compromise and feeling so happy you might explode. Your first love takes you to the mountain tops and the stars there are more spectacular than any you’ve ever seen. Your first love sits with you until your head finds a home in the crevice between their neck and shoulder and you want to stay, more than anything, you want to stay. Your first love laughs at your jokes and suddenly you are the world’s greatest comedian, it doesn’t matter that no one ever found you funny before, it doesn’t matter than tomorrow you still have to face the world. Your first love is like a safe, where you hide the treasures most precious to you because you think they’ll be around forever. Your first love teaches you loneliness, teaches you about endings and goodbyes and emptiness. Your first love makes breaking an arm sound like a walk in the park. Your first love promises that they won’t forget and you believe them until you see them kissing someone else on the street that you used to meet. Your first love makes you bitter. And your second love makes that bitterness go away.”

When she is sad: Ask her to dance. Take her hands and pull her up off the ground. She is fluid like water, like the wind and rain. Watch her twirl, round and round, as though she were a tornado. Sing her a song. She will rest her head on your chest and laugh. ‘You can’t even sing’ she will say, but do not stop. Do not stop until she is begging for your silence with her lips on yours in muffled gasps. Tell her a story: that time when you were five and fell into a pond and almost drowned. Tell her you are so glad a passerby dived in and saved your life because otherwise you would never have met her. Sit in silence and trace the veins in her neck with your tongue until she sighs and whispers ‘you are keeping me alive.’ Say that she is doing just fine on her own but hold her a little closer and tighter anyway; she needs it. “It’s okay. It’s okay to be sad.” Sometimes these are the only words you need. Pepper her tear stained cheeks with kisses and say “ it’s okay. I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.”