I remember the first time it happened. I was walking home from the bus stop. A very long, very hot day of high school had just ended, and I had somehow survived it. The walk back to my house was a short distance, but it felt even shorter because I hadn't lifted my eyes from my phone even once. A certain warmth flooded my stomach, and I was dizzy from smiling like a lunatic. I couldn't quite give the feeling a name, but my heart was soaring. What was happening to me?
After that day, all the cells in my body seemed to hum at every point in the day. My heart raced at the thought of seeing a certain name pop up on my lock screen, aching to have it be him. Suddenly, everything was just a reminder of him--the blue of the lockers, the handwriting of the person next to me, even the way one of my teachers pronounced the word "water."
He was everywhere, he was inside my head.
I remember when it ended. The crushing defeat sitting on my chest, smirking at me every single day. I felt like I had lost a piece of me, like there was a hole in my stomach, a darkness in my vision. My eyes would burn with the promise of unshed tears, threatening to fall any second.
My palms would become clammy at the thought of an old text, an old memory. There were no more cells alive in my body — just a fire burning in the pit of my stomach. How could this feeling be so hot and so cold at the same time? What was happening to me?
It took me so many long nights to figure out that love had crossed my path. She had lifted my heart, made it soar, and crushed it in her palm, all at the same time. I was so young — how could I possibly know what love was?
My friends laughed at the thought of love. "You have your whole life to feel love." "You're too young to feel love." "There's no way you could be in love."
Why can't I be in love? What does age have anything to do with love, especially when there are so many different kinds of love? All of them are real. I don't need to know the endless walls outside of high school hallways to know the long nights I stayed up, in gut-wrenching pain from a broken heart that refused to heal.
I don't need to be in college or middle-aged to know that my heart may never be so full ever again. Everyone has their own definition of love, and there should be no age pinpointed to who can experience it or not.
My point is merely this: stop telling kids that they do not know how to love or what it feels like to be in love. Love is in fact, more than knowing the "real" world. Love hurts, and there are so many like myself who knew that pain, even at a young age, such as in high school.
Stop telling us that we don't have the capacity to love with our whole hearts, because the sad and real truth is that we, in fact, unfortunately, fall in love the same way adults do. We get hurt the same way adults do. I don't need to be 30, living on my own, and working full time to know that I've met love. She is a storm who knows no age.
