Young Writers Society

The first boy I ever loved peered into my adolescent heart and thought it looked like home.

He walked with me through all of my dramatic stories and memories of “back when” as if we were strolling, hand in hand, through a garden of recollections.
And he liked all of my flowers – even the ones I didn’t. He would pick them from the dirt, intertwine them, and place them in my big, messy hair like a crown.

Soon, I was clothed head to toe in all of his favorite flowers, and I loved the way I felt but most of all I loved the way he watched me – as if he had been waiting his whole short life to smile at me as I twirled in the sunshine.

But “forever” turned out to be much shorter than we thought.

The dirt shifted underneath the sidewalk in the garden, and the bricks cracked, and slowly – so slowly that it was agonizing – all the flowers died. Even the ones in my hair.

I left the lamp posts on at the entrance to the garden, and I even tried planting his favorite flowers; but they wouldn’t grow, and he never came home.

The second boy I ever loved walked through my garden without an invitation.

He complained that the bricks were uneven, and he didn’t like my flowers.

So he pulled them up by their roots, planted different ones – that I never would’ve picked for myself – and asked me to water them.

Even then, when I say “asked,” it’s an act of generosity.

He developed a habit of arson.

He would pour gasoline in my bones and light matches on my heart and then scold me when I burned.

Eventually, he would put out the fire and step back to look at me from a distance – the same way an artist does when he finishes a masterpiece and slowly inches backward until he can view it the same way admiring museum patrons will.

Except I wasn’t a masterpiece.

I was charred and burnt up and I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror anymore. And so I let him tell me who I was, because I was exhausted from trying to find myself, and he was all too eager.

“No one else would ever want you like this,” he would whisper, as he brushed ash out of my hair.

And I would thank him for extinguishing the flames.

The third boy I ever loved knew I loved him before I did.

I had built tall fences around my heart, even though there wasn’t anything left inside to protect, and I forced him to stay on the outside.

He brought honey for my burns, and I could almost feel the relief of it just by looking at him. But I refused it.

He brought flowers to be planted, and his eyes lit up like the sun and I just knew that his flowers would grow bright and beautiful… but I refused to plant them. I took them from him, and placed them in a vase, and I admired them in their home on the window sill until they inevitably dried up.

I watched from in between the slats of the fence – I waited for him to leave, but each time he did, he only returned with more flowers.

When I finally invited him inside, it felt more like he was bringing me home.

We planted flowers in the uneven dirt, and he watered them, every single day, without fail.

Even when I became terrified that they would one day die, so what's the point, and I pulled them up myself to save some damage, he still planted new ones. Still he stayed.

And I was right. These flowers grew in tremendous ways.

I smiled as the roots burrowed deep into my heart, and they felt strong enough that I knew we were safe – holding onto each other.

And the stems became my veins, and the petals unfurled like my laughter, and our garden was unfathomable.

Incomparable.

Nearly impossible.

But there it was, and there it will stay.

The first boy I ever loved is a father now, and we don’t talk anymore.

There’s still sadness leftover that from the wonder of “what if” and “if only,” but I know that our ending was good. In all of the cliché, worn out, overused ways that the word “good” is good. I know this because when I think of him, I can feel light shining through the cracks in the sidewalk.

The second boy I ever loved still lives in our home town, exactly where I left him.

I hope one day he burns alive, and that he’ll be put on display.

And the museum patrons will admire his broken body and wonder what this masterpiece means.

But I won’t have to wonder, because I’ll know.

I’ll know that he went up in flames because he spent too much time holding a lit match and eventually even the match itself couldn’t take it anymore so it overpowered him.

That’s art.

And the third boy I ever loved still waters my flowers everyday.