The Memoirs of Love

3 December 2004

7:14 P.M.

One can live a thousand lives and love a million times and never know what love is. That is all I know about love. It comes in all different shapes and guises, sometimes even under the pretense of hate. It slips in and out of one’s fingers and soul, possessive, possibly destructive.

In the second grade, I fell “like” with a blue-eyed boy. We held hands on the swing set and pushed each other into the mud. In the third grade, he left me for a girl who always had chocolate pudding in her lunch. This was my first rejection. What is this world coming to? An eight-year-old cynical about love. And not even that stopped me.

I have loved so many times, I’m too scared to even go back and count. All the nights I lay awake. But it was a different kind of love. Of course, I understand, one cannot make life-long commitments in the seventh grade, but there was still love, nonetheless. A small, simple love under the guise of preadolescent hormones. Love is selfless, and selfish all the same.

One might ask, “If love is such a strange, mysterious thing, how is it one even knows that it is happening to him/her?” You will know that love has taken you when hearing that person say your name is the highlight of your week. Seeing that person is the highlight of your day. And then when he/she is gone, he/she takes away the sun and your arms ache where they long to hold him/her.

And yet, love is selfless……right? I saw he was in love with her, and they were happy. What sort of attention would a senior pay a measly little freshman, anyway? Looking back, I would never wish ill will upon her. He had no obligation to me, nor did she. I was the third party, who came upon the situation just a bit too late. And, even now, I would give the world to go back to the way it was. Every touch, every world, every glance seemed to give me a reason to live. Without him, I truly am nothing.

Love can be selfish, as well. I never expected him to be with me. Of course, that does not mean I was completely self-sacrificing. I would not be the poet I am today with out him. For he is the subject of nearly all of them. Hopeless love poems that, in the end, only skim the surface of the meaning of love.

This is what I know about love: it consumes you. Like a disease, it gets into your blood and works its way through every part of you. And – in my case – it hurts. I’ve never known anyone to return my love. I am a safe person, terrified of rejection, yet all too acquainted with it. So safe, I suppose, he never really knew who I really am. And, neither will I.