What I've Learned of Lust and Love (In Progress)
Adults have told us our whole lives. When we rushed home that one fateful day of seventh grade, crying and heartbroken, our parents told us, “You’re in seventh grade. Don’t waste your tears. You’re too young to be dating, anyway.” We stifled our sobs and closed our bedroom doors to put another barrier between our preadolescent and fully realized understanding, and their aged, irrelevant, bombastic, and irrefutable understanding. They just don’t get it.
Senior year and all the younger years that brought us here forced many more heartbreaks and tears upon us. They distracted us from anatomy and calculus exams, sports teams and musicals, and hung over our conscious minds like a dismal fog. We miss the person who caused the crumbling of our sanity. We miss their hugs, their laugh, the smell of their car, the smell of them. We miss their spontaneity, their humor, and the way they sneakily kissed us when no one was looking. There’s a black silhouette painted on our hearts; the shadow of them, their memory, that will stay there and darken us until somebody else lights up our world again.
That shadow is oppressive. It consumes the life of the abandoned. It steals any remaining remnants of happiness and runs away with them, leaving the lonely in an continually darkening shadow to sink deeper, deeper, deeper into despondency. Even the glimmers and sparks that once lit our spirits -- the jokes, the movies, the friends, the songs -- cannot shine bright enough to raise them. We are left with nothing but a bleak perspective and a hopelessness that throbs to our core.