Outgrow

Someday, someone is going to ask me who I truly fell in love with. They will ask how I fell in love and why it was you. And they will ask how it is possible to love someone without reservation, even when they couldn’t love me back barely half as much.

I will tell them that it was your smile and your laugh that embodied your juvenility and the purity of your soul. I will tell them it was your curiosity about the cogwheels of the human mind. I will tell them it was your intellect, your imagination, the beauty of your brain, ever expanding and seeking knowledge to conquer. I will tell them it was how you sought for more and feared your own demons but fought them. I will tell them you were radiant and you shone like the hope of the sun and the peace of moonlight.

I will tell them how I felt whole before you came, because I never truly perceived my hollowness until you filled the cracks of my being. I carved my life empty to accommodate your entrance and I engraved you into my memory.

But I will also tell them that I was young and foolish, that I wasn’t truly in love with you but only with the idea of love. Half a decade later, I realize that I don’t really know who you were nor who you are now. You were a concept that I enjoyed deconstructing, a puzzle that I devoted myself into, an enigma that left me perplexed. I was smitten then infatuated then consumed, then, ultimately, destroyed.

But that wasn’t love, but the passing of youth. I will tell them that love is a two-way street: at times you crash into another, at times you drive by them all, but you cannot have both lanes all to yourself. You came and you went. And all I remember now is the passing breeze that swept across my face and that scent of a brief memory that has now begun to dissipate into the air.