i hope it's real, i hope you're there, i hope it's nice

my first real boyfriend was in high school but i didn’t love him, not even in the young puppy love way. at the end of our junior year, he told me he loved me by writing ‘i love you’ in my yearbook after filling up a whole page with a rambling and shallow reminiscing of the past year. i fell in love in middle school with a boy who had bleached blonde hair that contrasted starkly against his jet black eyebrows. the first day i saw him, he wore black high top converse with a goldfinger band t-shirt and i thought he was the most beautiful boy i had ever seen in my life. he was quiet, observant and shy but i would catch him smirking quizzically to himself in class and it was the first time i understood what the word ‘yearning’ meant. the type of yearning that comes from being a young girl who was curious and oozing with feelings too big for her body, feelings too big for her to hold onto. the type of yearning that can only come from a young girl who dreams, hopes, wishes and fantasizes about something that can’t really exist.

we held hands once. we barely kissed one time, if you could even call it that. it was more of a quick graze of his lips on mine - just long enough to tell that his lips were dry and chapped but quick enough to be relieved that i didn’t have to pretend to know how to french kiss- in the darkness of a school talent show. later that night, my friend and i ran home in shock and exhilaration of my first kiss but more so because it was a kiss with him. he was never my boyfriend, not even in the pretend way that middle schoolers do but we would spend hours talking after school promising each other that if we weren’t married by thirty, we would marry each other. i loved him. thirteen year old me remembered thinking that love seemed so easy. you hold hands, you kiss in the dark, you make promises that seem easy to keep and that’s all that you really need to do.

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my high school boyfriend barged into my fifth period class and asked my teacher if he could talk to me for just a minute. he pulled me outside and by the row of royal blue lockers, he asked me to be his girlfriend. a grand gesture at a young age that made me feel more important than i really was but that’s how it was with him. our first fight, he put out a lit cigarette on his arm as an apology. the second fight, he did the same thing. he showed me the two cigarette burns, almost perfect circles side by side, and i remember tracing them with the tip of my finger while sitting on the curb right outside the high school grounds. i asked him why he did that and i remember him shrugging and telling me he needed to show me he was sorry. i asked him what will he do when he’s ninety and still has these scars but he won’t even remember who i am by then. his willingness to hurt himself on my behalf made me feel sick and even at sixteen i knew i would be too scared to love him even in the simplest way a teenager knows how. where does one learn that? how do we learn to equate love with hurt? where do we learn to apologize by hurting ourselves?

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my preferred way to go to the movies is alone. i create a ritual around it. i get a cheeseburger with no tomato, light mayo and raw onions with a diet coke and small french fries. i eat in the car with one hand while speeding to the theater to make the showing time. i get a small popcorn, peanut m+m’s and a diet cherry coke. i always sit in the last row in the theater, toward the back and toward the wall. i like to feel cocooned by the darkness and i prefer not to sit near people if i can help it.

i watched past lives this last week and as i walked back to my car, i thought about how love is so complicated. relationships are so dynamic and ever-changing. feelings are fleeting, we are one person but we contain so many different versions of us in one small frame tethered by bones and skin. we are so desperate to feel seen and felt and understood and the idea or knowledge of someone seeing us for who we are or the version of ourselves that are not so readily seen is intoxicating and heartbreaking and devastating all at once. i thought about how the purest form of love is consideration- consideration that the person you love is a whole person outside of their role in your life as someone you’re in love with and who in turn, is in love with you. i thought about how much heart and kindness it takes to hold someone while their heart breaks for selfish reasons, reasons that feel threatening to you and the stability you feel with them. i thought about how much love it takes to make space for someone to grieve feelings that can’t go anywhere, feelings that can’t blossom and thrive and have enough empathy to understand how tragic that can feel. i thought about how much love it takes to hold the person you love’s feelings like that in your hands and know that all you can do is watch them experience their own life outside of you with kindness and compassion. i thought about how this is the closest thing to unconditional love if it actually exists. i thought about how love isn’t always about worship but it’s about understanding.

i thought about how one day i will know i am truly loved by how understood i am and how i am held through all seasons of my life and how i will be seen as someone beautiful and worthy of patience and consideration even when i feel like i do not deserve it at all.

i think about this and i hope it’s real, i hope you’re there, i hope it’s nice.

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i am practicing the idea of dating without attachment. i have never done this before because i am a girl who gets attached. i am a girl who cares too much. i am a girl who will pour her heart out. i am a girl who will take care of you because i want to, because i feel and can see you want to be taken care of and don’t we all wait for our turn to be taken care of? i am a girl who will make the space for you. i am a girl who cannot play coy for the life of her. i am a girl who would rather say too much than too little. i am a girl who loves solitude but doesn’t know what to do with distance. i am a girl who understands to be loved is to to be changed. i am a girl who loves to bask in the bubbly warmth of infatuation. i am a girl who reads too much into the way someone holds my hand or the way they kiss my cheek. i am still the girl who is still too curious, still oozing with feelings too big for her body, feelings too big for her to hold onto. i am still the girl who hopes and fantasizes for something that should be real, for something that should exist. but the most honest is that i am simply a girl who continues to yearn.

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i think about the boy i fell in love with in middle school. he’s married now with two young boys. his life is beautiful and when i come across photos of them on social media, my heart swells five sizes bigger for him and his radiant wife. i think about how the version of him i knew was someone tender, sensitive and gentle and i could see how those qualities grew into something bigger than him and led to something magnificent.

i was at the mall with my mom the other day and i saw a girl i went to high school pushing a sleek black stroller with the canopy pulled up, shielding her baby from the world. we met eyes and both of us recognized each other but we refused to acknowledge it which i was thankful for.

i think about where i am in my life. single, childless, a tower of empty cardboard boxes almost reaching the ceiling in my apartment entryway creating a modernist sculpture of sorts, an empty wine glass with crusted orange juice pulp by my bedside, my blush pink antique chair being a holder of clean and dirty laundry mixed together, my beauty products splayed out all over my bathroom counter, my books as my only real decor and my lack of furniture- still, even after 6 months. i think about how i sleep alone, i wake up alone. i think about how there is no one to answer to, no one i am responsible for, no one responsible for me, no one i need to check in with, no one that i need to please, no one that will get annoyed about my orange pulp wine glass and although it feels unfamiliar, it feels freeing because i am thinking about the kind of love i want and the kind of love i deserve and i don’t know who i will receive it from but i just know i’m not settling for anything less than what i am imagining in my heart.

marina tsvetaeva said, “in my early childhood, for as long as i can remember, i thought that i wanted to be loved. now i know and tell everyone: i don’t need love, i need understanding.”

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try a little tenderness q+ a will be tomorrow along with a recipe.

thank you for being here.

i am so happy you are.

x,

e