I felt you in my legs before I ever met you. And when you lay beside me, for the first time I told you. I feel you in my heart, and I don’t even know you.
I can’t remember the last time I heard a song that really made me feel something so strongly. When I was a teenager, I used to stay up with Panic! at the Disco albums on repeat on my iPod and I would just imagine what being in love is like. I thought if love sounded anything like Brendon Urie’s voice then I must be on the right track. Then I heard this song and it brought back everything.
I remember my first big big crush.
I remember driving home feeling so different, and I was so sure everyone could see it. I drove home and I kept touching my swollen lips and I knew that the world knew that I’d been kissing for hours. That I just had this air about me that screamed I had found the big L-O-V-E.
I was worried about the leaves on my windshield from spending the night at the boy’s house, because they weren’t the same leaves as the tree in front of my friend’s house that I told my parents I would be sleeping over at. I thought my mom would take one look at my windshield and just know.
Then summer passed and I never really felt that way again with him. And I stayed, and stayed, and stayed for way too long. Long after the maybe-love was gone, the butterflies had escaped out of my throat, and the “iloveyous” were preceded by tears and they really just meant “I’m sorry.”
Flew home, back to where we met. Stayed inside, I was so upset. Cooked up a plan, it was good except I was all alone. You were all I had.
I remember heartbreak, and I remember realizing after that it wasn’t a real heartbreak. I just didn’t want to be lonely. I didn’t want to go back to being alone.
I was so so so confused about whether any of it was worth it. The funny thing about dating a stranger (through an app, through a chance meeting) is you don’t really know the other person on the end. You don’t know who they were in high school or college, or if they ever got a detention or if they ever smoked weed.
I think I forced it because I wanted love so awfully. What was maybe supposed to just be a fling I stretched out well past its expiration date.
I think it’s too much for me to meet someone and in one or two months decide that I’m ready to be in a relationship. I don’t even make friends that fast. I definitely don’t love that fast.
But I get so excited and hopeful about love. I love love. I feel like I was meant to experience every single type of love there is and some days that puts me on a rush and other days that makes me scared.
I don’t think I am a faucet. I think it ends at some point.
I was nineteen. How could you blame me?
Prattle Peach 