I wrote this short story for my magazine, TwentyTwo, which you can view here.
People don't believe you when you say you're in love in tenth grade. It's dismissed as something small and insignificant: something you'll grow out of the way you grew out of Barbie dolls and pink dresses, of crayons and playing tag. And, most the time, it is small. It is insignificant. But, sometimes, it's something more. Sometimes, it really is love.
But, there are two types of love. There's the love that is kind and gentle, you know, the love that reminds you of rocking chairs and growing old together. It's comfortable and nice and warm and it should be enough, but for some people, for some reason, it's not.
And, that's because there's the kind of love that kicks you down. It's the kind of love that hits you in the stomach when you see a certain person, even if they're far away, and it makes you unable to breathe, unable to move. It's the kind of love that consumes you... the kind that makes you irrational. It's the type of love that makes you make delirious choices and bad decisions. It's the type of love that makes you feel powerless.
When you say you're in love in tenth grade, no one believes you. No one would ever believe it's the kind of love that leaves you broken.
Everyone says you'll grow out of it and, eventually, you do. You'll settle down into a more comfortable love, something more dependable, although settle isn't the right word. It's love, in fact, it's probably a better love. It's calm. It's strong. It's predictable.
And, oh, you'll be in love. You'll care deeply about this person you fell in this comfortable love with, perhaps even imagining spending the rest of your life with them. There's sparks sometimes and there's magic sometimes... but it's not the same electrifying feeling that left you paralyzed on the floor. It's not the kind of love that made you physically sick, the kind that kept you from eating, from thinking, from being.
As the years go on, you'll think maybe you imagined it. Things always seem bigger, more impressive when you're younger. Maybe that feeling is a false memory. Maybe it never existed. And, after awhile, after repeating it enough, you'll have made yourself believe it.
Until.
Until someone else, a person you are not in comfortable love with, a person you hardly even know, will look you straight in the eye and all of the sudden, you feel like you're suffocating again.
You don't know this person. Not yet. In fact, you might never. You might lay in your bed, trying to shake the feeling, the memory of them looking straight through you. You might run back to your comfortable love and forget that look that shattered you, that brought back the feelings you'd pushed so far down for so long. Most people would. There's something so reassuring about knowing someone cares about you, that someone is there for you to depend on. You'll try to forget the way the hairs on your arm stood straight when this other person touched you on the elbow, you'll try to forget that you forgot to breathe when he smiled.
Or, you won't. You might take everything that you'd worked so hard to maintain, the stable love you were so proud to flaunt and destroy it for someone else's hand on your hip. On the back of your neck. On your heart.
The heartbreak - both from leaving your comfortable love and the inevitable destruction of whatever you gave it up for - will be worth it. Because, the second before he kisses you for the first time, when he presses you against the wall, when he nudges his nose against yours and you lock eyes, it's like you're in tenth grade again. And, finally, you know: this feeling is real.
But really, isn't that the problem? The feeling is real, but it doesn't last. Unhealthy love never lasts, it's fleeting and it's detrimental and it leaves you helpless and broken and alone. You'll want to go back to your dependable love, but you know you can't. Once you've been exposed to this unhealthy love, this all-consuming love, this love that tears you apart and breaks you down: there's no going back.