love made me an unwilling poet

 dear diary, 

    i was seventeen when i first fell in love. the taste of it still remains sticky red wine sweet on my tongue no matter how hard i try to scrape it off. 

    looking back on it now, i feel extremely maternal towards that little girl who saved up her first kiss so it was special. i want to tuck her close to me and tell her the sky is cruel but she will grow strong wings and an even stronger song. back then i had these wild fantasies that there was some kind of fairytale magic to first kisses. i suppose it was naivety talking, but my seventeen year old self really did have faith in what i believed to be true, before i learnt that everything is malleable and victim and soldier of change. for some reason,  i really did believe happily ever afters were as real as the leaves turning red in autumn and the flowers blossoming in spring. 

    my last year of high school had just begun and i was slowly getting used to saying goodbye. i've never really been good at goodbyes. even now, they make my throat close up and sting at my eyes. airports turn me into a fountain of sorts. the whole year i would learn to let go in little ways until i no longer gripped what no longer served me. sometimes that would be study habits, other times it would be people. 

    it was october when i met a boy. my hair was long back then, and dark. i still had bangs. i still got drunk on purpose. i still believed in first kiss magic. i have this thing where when i look into someone's eyes, i can foresee little things. and when i looked into this boy's eyes, i could feel from the bottom of my mary janes to the top of my  stubborn head that i was going to fall in love with him. at the back of my mind, i also knew i was going to fall out of it. 

    november passed by quickly. time passes by quickly when you're falling in love. it's all candlelight, mazzy star, le labo, and secret, stolen moments all wrapped up in sheets and sticky silver moonlight. soon enough, the new year was upon us and i learnt that sometimes having something good doesn't always mean a goodbye. 

    looking back on pictures of this girl now, with her shy smile and soft eyes, i wonder if she knows that two years later i would be sitting in a cafe in montreal, drinking a latte and swallowing my musings. i wonder if she knows within that same year, the new year that had promised slices of heaven and wishbones split down the middle, that there will always be goodbyes and some are harder than others. i think deep down she knew. maybe she kept it locked in a chamber deep within her heart and tossed away the key, but i still think she knew. 

    two years later, and i feel like i've lived a million little lifetimes in this life that i have been given. i often reflect upon this time of my life because we are perpetually becoming after all, but more so because i still mourn that girl whose first kiss is owed back. i suppose i can thank him for helping me love myself wearing my glasses. and maybe also teaching me a thing or two about loving and letting go. 

    i don't want my innocence back. he can keep that for all i care. i never really believed in the constitution of innocence as something that could be taken or lost. that state- that girl with big eyes in the photos- is still within me and i will carry her always, tucked into my coat pocket like a lucky coin. 

    my mantra for now and the future: i want to fall in love a hundred times over. i want my heart broken and bleeding on a sidewalk drizzled in rain. i want to fall fast and fall hard and i want to lose. i want to cry on the phone, i want to kiss with a honey reckless mouth, i want to feel the pain of letting someone go that doesn't want to be let go of. i want tragic touches and scarlet marks on skin and the knowing that lips are not made merely for kissing but for speaking: love, you made me an unwilling poet and i thank you for it. i want everything and i want it with every blood-hot vein in my body. 

xoxo, 

dani