Young Writers Society

As the years go by, we gather regrets like dust and ghosts like baseball cards. Things change and change and change and still I am that girl who spent hours in the forest just looking at the ferns, the girl who glued eyes on rocks and dreamed the most fantastic dreams, the girl whose love was never once marred by doubt or uncertainty. Still I am that girl. I have not been that girl for so long.

That longing for love is what drives me. It’s what drives all of us, really. The symposium of wants and fears and needs and doubts all gather to discuss it, the ancients and the not-so-ancients, the wise and the fools.

We love and then we don’t and that love becomes ghosts. The girls I laughed with in the back of the car that day haunt me, those lines which were drawn between us still seen like a half-erased pencil mark. The man I met in the bookstore who told me I was wise to only let those I call friends truly see me is still out there across the sea. The men and women who showed me the strength of the human spirit and the shortness of life scatter across countries and oceans and worlds. I play these memories like old cassettes, like books with tired spines or a game of soccer in the backyard.

And that most desired love, too, the one between two souls somehow tied together by heartstrings and shared looks and longing: this, too, I play over and over and over until the colours grow dim.

And still he haunts me, this boy I only saw through storybook eyes and a heart like unmolded clay.

And still he haunts me, this boy who looked at me like I was the water that rushed through the brook and the rays of light that lit the sky even as the sun was dying.

And still he haunts me, this boy whose face I have not seen since the trees last shed their red-hued leaves and the smile on my face was not forced.

And still I am alone.

And that love which I never understood, the love that is to look in a mirror and not look away, the love that is to hold one’s own hand and to never fear falling, this too grazes my fingertips and dances away.

And still she haunts me, the girl who could smile in a way that was not scripted and the girl whose love was pure and the girl who didn’t know how to be anything but herself, the girl who didn’t know anything at all and was okay with that.

And still I am this haunted mansion, and the lights flicker and flicker and flicker and I phase through walls and I am these walls which I phase through and death smells like peeling wallpaper and mirrors that have not been cleaned in too long.

I have these regrets and ghosts and nowhere at all to put them but my shoebox heart and my mind that can’t stop overthinking. And still this love eludes me.