Young Love

A Poem

To the young ones,

I promise you will forget them.

You’ll forget their saucer-big,
blue eyes opening to you like

a baby bird willing for your blessed worms.
You’ll forget the warm hugs

in their band merch sweaters.
You’ll forget the feeling of hollow

that wraps around your naked ring
finger, wherein it waits

for that dreamy, programmed assurance.
You’ll forget the righteous chip on your shoulder

etched from broken promises— the ones that fell
from the lips of someone too young and too brash

to know their limits.
Too proud to admit they have them.

You’ll forget their smell.
You’ll forget their music.

You will.

And it might sound scary
because maybe you feel loyal

to wearing their shroud forever
but, baby, you will forget them. 

And before you realize they no longer
take up space in your veins

in will come a
booming breath

of fresh
life.

Wonder and space felt anew.
No whispers of dead wings.

No more soured love
sickening the wind.

Resonance will flow in and
it will lift you and

you will fill your days with awe
and some.

To the young ones,

I promise you will forget them.

No one could have saved me from the torment of the mismatches and unrequited love I put myself through as a young, wide-eyed thing. So many of us have, at one time or another, poured indelible energy into trying to wrangle a love that we think will complete us, make our lives as meaningful as a movie, or prove to us that our wild and childish feelings are as substantial as they seem.

When I look upon my lover throughout our last five years together, such joy and bliss fill me: such connection, authentic openness, fear of the grandiose, and the simultaneous courage to hold it. We are creating together everything I could have ever dreamed of in a relationship. He is such a gift, such a beautiful light in my life. He is the partner I never imagined because I let myself get so caught up in imagining rather than being entirely truthful with what was before me.

One day a ways back, I looked in the mirror and could see the gold light of love pouring from my eyes. In that moment, I sat down to write this poem, thinking about my little sister and her ongoing attachment to her first intoxicating love. To her tussle with loss of self to enmeshment.

These are the words I wish she could believe, words I’ve never shared, for I know from experience that young love will do what it does. I can only support her efforts to grow and evolve and hope that she one day grows away from this attachment–an attachment that clouds her belief that she deserves and can receive a type of love that goes so far beyond a youthful, lustful, cinematic narrative.

Do you recall when you once felt the ache of that young, stubborn assumption, “soul mates”?

Do you recall what it was that helped you let that go?

For me, moving on from it was more than moving on from a person. It was moving on from a force that drove me for all of my young adulthood.

I had to get so stinkin’ drenched with such immeasurable pain and betrayal, toxicity, and manipulation. Soaked to the bone with torment and on the brink of death, I finally reach my breaking point. To the point of either needing to vanish forever or choose to let this engrained idealogy of young love go at last.

I hope that sort of pain isn’t required for my little sister to move on, but I wonder how else folks might find their freedom from the captivity of media-influenced romance?

Is there anything your young self could have heard and believed about the expendable truth of young love in all its ephemeral haze? What have or what will you say to your young loved ones when they find themselves caught in the yarn of young love and loss?