We convinced ourselves there was love. That’s the saddest part. We began to believe that love was in the loudness, that love was the constant motion of feelings and heart aches, that love was only ever opaque: making it hard to hear anything over the roar of it, making it impossible to feel anything other than the bumps and slumps, and ultimately making it impossible to see anything through the permanent film. That’s where we got it wrong.

Love shouldn’t have minimized the scope in which we saw. Love is in the quietness: in syllables not spoken, in black and white movies, in moments of mourning, moments of awe, in the rustling of sheets in the dark. Love is in the stillness: of faded photographs of generations passed, open country skies where the stars drip down to kiss the abyss, when the ocean could cut the horizon like glass. Love is clarity: a baby’s first breath coupled by a shrill scream, in knowing how one likes their coffee, in knowing who’s calling without checking the caller i.d. 

Love was in all the things we took for granted, all the trivial moments we looked past and forgot about. How selfish we looked upon our time together, convinced we’d always have a moment more to instagram or tag, or blog about. Love is in the moments you don’t tell anyone about. Love is so much more simple than what we complicated. Love is so much more important than all of our moments of selfishness and feigned passion. And this is only the beginning of love. 

There are days like today when you’ve got all the words in the world to say but no one to say them to. And you’ve got all the time in the world to think but no one to make sense of it all. Or when you think you finally understand what you’ve been tiptoeing around for ages but in all reality you’ve only hit the tip of the ice burg. There are days like today when you miss people you shouldn’t, and want to give them a call. There are days like today when you think of the best comeback to an argument that happened years ago. There are days when you can’t talk anyone you love about things that are bothering you because it would only make things complicated. There are days like today when you wonder if you’ve ever really forgiven someone, or if you were ever really forgiven. I’m waiting on tomorrow, I’m breathing for it because today just isn’t worth　 all this worry.

Some days I don’t see the point in falling in love, and other days it hits me that it’s the most important thing I could ever be capable of.

It’s just really crappy when someone’s really lovely, and wonderful but just doesn’t reciprocate your feelings towards them. And it sucks even more when you’re as generally awkward as I am. It’s even worse when you know you shouldn’t be in want of someone because they’re just an all over good, secure, wise person. And you’re 19 and awkward and your best friend is your Mom and you’re still figuring out that being kind is more important than being nice and you don’t know what sort of person you want to be. It’s just really unfair when they’re really courteous about your feelings, and want to make you feel okay with having a crush on them. But all you want to do is be 21, and on your own, and have a good head on your shoulders, and go out to dinner with friends, and not have to work all the time, and be this powerful woman of God. But even then it wouldn’t help because it’s just the worst in that moment, and nothing can change that. When do crushes lose their literal meaning? At what age do I stop getting crushed?

Allow me to sum up the hope you give me:

Life is going to be wonderful; right here, and right now. 

“I feel you in my heart. And I don’t even know you.”

I met my mom’s first love tonight. Kurt was the first of the three significant men in her life. Number two being her first husband, and my father. And number three being her second husband, whom she divorced a few months before she passed away of leukemia in ‘94.

When they met he was seventeen, and she was eighteen. I had heard stories about him from my Mama (my grandma, and adopted mom) and my aunts but I was never introduced to him. He was Kurt, her best friend, her first love, the boy with the coin collection, the boy with ADHD, so insignificant and kind. Well, my aunt reconnected with him over facebook recently and he came to my house to visit with my Mama and the rest of the family today.

I was on my way to see baby Ema for the first time, and couldn’t really stop and say hello. Our first introduction was me rolling down the window of my car and telling my aunt that I would be back soon. He barely noticed me, and I admit, I was a tad offended at first. You know how being over looked always gets under my skin. But he was still there when I got back, though it was nearly nine at night. Tonight we learned that he didn’t even know she had died. It’ll be the 16th anniversary of her death this year, and he had just been going along with all of this pent up love, and memories in his heart waiting for her.  He stared at my face the entire time, and I watched a man, now in his late forties, hold back tears. My heart broke for him, and even though a few hours before I had been against meeting a man who had loved my mother who was not my father, I let him stare, and he hungrily took in the brown depths showcased by my thick lashes, and my freshly washed hair identical to her texture, and the paleness of my skin disrupted by the red skin that crept up when my Mama asked me questions. I was the only living link, my mother’s only legacy: all of her greatness and sparkle was captured in me, her love for the arts, her passion for words and music, her desire to run and never stop all embodied in my nineteen year old body. I was the spitting image of her youth, and I felt like a ghost as he tried to advert his eyes from my face to answer my Mama’s questions. My Mama hated the intensity, in which he watched me, but you’ve made me so accustomed to things like that, I couldn’t be frightened. He had married, had children, and divorced but had always, always thought of my mother.  

“She set the standard for everything in my life. All the greatness I wanted, and achieved sprouted from her.”

I felt helpless, and, alive, and worthy of so much more because my mother had been loved so wholly, and securely. She was remembered in happiness, and passion.

And I couldn’t help but thinking of you when this whole thing was going on, because you were my first love. And I thought that even if the first thing you heard about me twenty years from now was that I died how much better that would be than to tell of a tale that is so dramatic, and, childish, and complicated as to what we really are. I am all for putting the past behind me, but because you will always be inherently a part of me, a part of my story: I don’t want the final interaction between us to be something unforgiveable.  I couldn’t bear for our previous conversation to be how I tell the story of my first love. Every story can have a happy ending: even if it isn’t love or a coming together of a merry band of men.

I can say sorry for all that I’ve done to you, for the hurt, confusion, doubt, and anguish. I’m sorry for contributing to any mind games we played, for allowing any of the sickness and cancer that was our relationship to grow. I believe in the greatness, and the good in you. I hope to hear wonderful and big things about you. I apologize, and hope you accept. I don’t expect anything in return, I just needed you to know that I’m sorry and how much I wish things could have been different.

I didn’t love you like you deserved, I loved selfishly, with naivety, and too hard. But it was all I knew how; it was what I had been taught. But I don’t want to be that, I don’t want to be remembered for that.

I want to be remembered like Kurt remembers my mom: special, and a part of you (no matter how insignificant that piece may be). I love your memory right now, and I think that’s the biggest justice I can ever do for you. I love it fully and rightly for all the good, and bad, and weird, and wonderful.  It may have taken me six years, but my heart is finally ready to grow up. 

In love, always, 

B

I hope you enjoy. I’m beginning this a day before my Ninteenth Birthday, and I’m really excited to try a more stripped down, honest approach to writing.

I’ll continue to post excerpts from my work in progress Hiding in the Glitter, and more poetry.

Thanks for following.