#kindve

some Luna bluemoona extremes

love isn’t supposed to be scary

love isn’t supposed to make your whole body shake and your stomach turn inside out and your heart drop every time you see the person you “love”, love isn’t supposed to make you wake up in the middle of the night in fear of a future with said person, it shouldn’t make you anxious, and it shouldn’t hurt

you’d think that’d be obvious, but i’m nine years old and i don’t know anything about love other than the boy i normally play with has a “crush on me”. i try to ignore it, play as usual, but he keeps dropping things in our game like “our wedding” and “my wife” and “our house with kids” and i laugh uneasily. i start dreading going to afterschool care. i stop talking to his friends. my stomach knots with unease and i slowly drop from that group of boys entirely, falling in with a completely different group of girls and i stop talking to him. i cant look at him but i feel him look at me and it feels like fire on my back. “let’s play somewhere else” i tell my new friends.

he still haunts me until i transfer to a new school in grade 6, meet new boys. i always get along so well with boys. we run around outside and dive into snow banks with no jackets. we pull pranks and disrupt class and sit in the fields telling awful jokes and it’s fun until it happens again. he totally has a crush on you. i cant sit still anymore. im full of agony when im away from him and i cant breathe when im near him. im constantly in a state of anxiety. im hyperaware of him at all times and i feel paranoid when i dont know where he is. i jump when i see him!!!

“ask him out” my friends say.

you see, things have changed since i was nine. boys don’t have cooties anymore. my classmates have been dating for years. he likes you. therefore, you date him. i don’t want to be near him. i dont. i feel sick. but that must be what love is, right? thats what all my friends say. you’re looking for him, you love him. he likes you. you have to do it. i move classes after the end of the schoolyear.

the school is broken up into pods. you were in pod 3. the first day of school every grade is put into classes by last name for orientation and to learn their pod. he was in my class. the look on his face when the teacher announced i was in pod 4 haunted me.

i wasn’t the only person switched to pod 4

he likes you

why does this keep happening

you like him. ask him out! what would you do if he asked you out?

my hands are shaking. i would say no, i tell them

you need to stop lying to yourself!

i’m not, though. i may “love” him, in the sense of, what i have always understood to be “love”, but i don’t want him near me. i genuinely do not want him near me. i dont want him to touch me. i dont want him to look at me. im informed this feeling is “love”

i didnt know any better.

what does a kid know at 9? my entire life id felt sick and gross and uncomfortable and anxious and misinterpreted this as love. its what everyone told me that feeling was. love was associated with negatives. love was pain. i didnt want it. i was so desperately relieved to be single, i dreaded the day i actually had a boyfriend, i resented the concept of marriage. i didnt want any of it. i was drawn to the concept of repricioromantic when i learned about it because i could only ever return affection, i never fell in love with a boy before he fell in love with me! but the truth was that i was never in love to begin with.

a girl on tumblr had a crush on me, messaged me every day and confessed to me in the cutest way and it didn’t end well, but i finally learned what love was. i was full of butterflies and smiles and whenever i saw her face i smiled and stared at something so beautiful and i loved it. i wasn’t scared, or anxious, or sick, i was in love.

love should feel good. love should feel natural. love should be a positive. it should draw you in, not push you away. i spent so, so goddamn much of my childhood in agony, straight girls pushing me towards boys i was supposed to “love” even though everything about me indicated that it wasn’t the case.

ironically, there was only one boy who didn’t make me anxious. it was one week at a film school and we got along and on the last day he called me pretty and i called him pretty too and he made my heart pound and it turns out we’re both gay and that was just my fucking puberty gaydar relieved to finally find a fellow gay and we instantly clicked and That’s Hilarious my dudes.

Mike: Haha I just typed nose with my nose

Will: Heart

Mike: Will are you okay?

USA