Cimorene

I don't really have anything interesting to say on this subject, because I've never been able to say the words and mean them romantically. I don't really think that at this point in time -- I mean, I don't, am not even sure what words mean in that context.

I use the word 'love' with a lot of things. My sister, my books, Neapolitan ice cream, shoes, and coffee, to name a few. I've said to an internet boy say 'I love you', signing off, but it felt hollow and shallow (when I was dizzy with that first 'real' crush. When he said it to me, though, I felt like it was something good and great and to be cherished because it was brilliant and new, and I thought he maybe might, even though at the back of my mind I knew he couldn't possibly, because grade school romances never last).

I've also said to another, more serious, older-and-wiser guy, 'Listen, I love you, or maybe I don't, or maybe I might, someday, just not right now, okay?' But I don't even think I knew what the hell I was saying. I still don't. Love is a very confusing business.

I guess I'm just sort of biding my time, waiting until it's my turn, until it's like, seriously my turn, until I've grown up enough to know if it really is cliched and trite, or if it's something real and important.

I've always seen myself with a guy, holding hands in the hallway, leaning against his locker and smiling, but it doesn't matter if it's a girl. I mean, the sort of love one reads about -- the sor tof love I think you mean, I like to think, in my romantic way, that it has no boundaries. Gender, age, social status. So I could fall with a girl five years older than I am, a princess, or maybe a girl living in a trailer, and if I was, indeed, in love, it wouldn't matter, would it?

I try to keep an open mind towards love, and its changeable nature, but a diet of cheap, high-school romance novels at a too-young age was really bad for me, and formed some sort of prefabricated view of love. Everything's just sort of being redifined as I go.

Also, this boy once told me, "You invented love." I said, surprised, "I did?" and he said, "Of course you did. Do you think anyone defines love in the same, precise way you do? You invented love." So I guess love is in the eye of the beholder. Might mean one thing to someone, another thing to another person, so on and so forth.

Whoa. Sorry. Didn't mean to ramble on and on at you. I guess what I'm trying to say is... from the bottom of the age totem pole, the world littered with bi-weekly recyclable boyfriends, love is just something weird and not altogether 'real'. It's a cheap and watered-down version of the 'real thing', used mostly in MSN screen names such as "OMG I LUV U BABY 4EVA U MAH BABYBOI 4 LYF!" It's Avril Lavigne on the radio, and couples snogging two seats away from you at lunchtime. That's the purest form of love down here. I hope it gets purer.

(And I ramble on again. I'm going to stop now, honestly. Thanks, by the way. This really made me think.)