a letter to the little girl whose eyes resemble my own

I know. I know that it’s difficult to stomach the fact that love can be disastrous, but it is what it is, and they’re over: the days of believing that love is throwing popsicle sticks away with your lips stained with chocolate and your hand cradled in your mother’s, or that love is going to the book store that offers five books for little money, or that love is walking with someone who makes you smile so wide that your teeth could be a home for the good. Those days are stuck in the memories of the past, and I guess you’re not even permitted to take them with you.

I know that it’s difficult to look at him in the eye without thinking of how it doesn’t feel right, thinking of how it should be better — with clandestine sparks only shared within an awfully romantic stare. You want to tell him about what you thought it would be, everything else minus the stomach flips, the willing surrender, the buckle of knees. It’s not found in the way I love your cigarette-scented exhales, you wish to say. But you don’t. You don’t, because you feel like your childhood beliefs have been false. And what worst way to wake up from a daydream than being jolted out of the better moments so suddenly, so unexpectedly.

I know that your tears aren’t caused by the brown-haired boy with eyes like swirling oceans rushing past the shoreline, I know that the heavy weight inside your stomach isn’t from dread or fear of what comes next. It’s the heartache you feel that ruins a good bit of your past. No one warned you that love is such an awful vacancy, only being filled when a person does it for you. You thought you could accommodate for yourself, but it never works. Reassurances only matter when they’re from someone else’s lips — particularly from an individual who means more than the walk of earth itself.

But now you know. You know how earth-shattering romance can be. It’s pushing and pulling, a constant tug-of-war between selfish bodies desperate for affection. But you should understand that the love you knew, the love you wanted, was real as could ever be. Because it’s yours. It’s yours and nobody else’s. What greater love there is, than the one you know yourself, and have kept tightly locked in that hoping heart of yours.