Love on time

I fell in love with you when I was eight years old. You had no clue whilst you braided my hair, sat on that old, round kitchen table, that you'd be sentencing yourself to a life of being the sole focus of my attention and the only occupant of my heart. You see, I fell in love with you at a time when girls are supposed to love boys, and boys are supposed to love girls. I knew this, so as time passed and our limbs stretched into the awkward constraints of the adolescent body, I tried to convince myself that you were in love with me too.

I would wait for you to look at me across the classroom, taking small glances and smiles as a sign that you must feel the same way. Why else would you run to hug me every morning on our walk to school, your embrace being the highlight of my day? I wondered if you knew that I always woke up thirty minutes earlier so that by the time I'd reached your front gate you'd be just walking out the door? I told myself that you'd do the same for me, It's funny how we decide things for other people. I would stand up to those girls who called you carrot-cake, I sewed the elbow patches onto your school jacket, I faked being so sick that our teacher had to let us both out of our maths lesson so you could take me to the nurse, I carried you all the way to the next village over after you twisted your ankle on a hike.

I would have done anything for you, and yet again I always assumed that you'd do the same for me. So when I spent a whole evening waiting for you to meet me by our fallen oak tree, only to find you'd spent it with a boy from the year above, I made excuses for you. I didn't even get angry, my loyalty to you being far too strong for that. Even though I spent that night crying into my pillow, my tears staining the thick fabric, I still held onto the hope that you loved me back, and were just waiting for the right moment to confess.

After a summer spent going on adventures and causing mischief together, I committed myself to a life of loving you, and solely you. When we both turned eighteen and we no longer suffered the ache of growing pains, and the world looked as though it was finally beginning to change, I told you this, that I loved you. It was the most frightening thing I had ever done, I'd written the words on the palm of my hand just in case I forgot how to speak, but by the time I stumbled into your room, they had melted away, leaving an inky mess on my fingers.

You said it back of course, like an excited schoolgirl, and immediately I could see that although our words were identical, the meanings were not. You loved me as a friend, and nothing more. I reassured myself that I'd wait for you, that you'd eventually see how hard and desperately I loved you and would have to love me back. I was willing for you to love me out of pity, something that is sad to admit even now.

Then, towards our last days of school, I was late. I had lost my socks and had spent my precious thirty minutes frantically searching for them, picturing you in the morning cold, shivering and alone, waiting for me. Finally, after finding them, I sprinted all the way to your house, not stopping once. I could barely breathe by the time I reached your gate, the white paint freckling onto my fingers as I threw it open, my breath forming fast, small clouds in the air. I couldn't see you so I assumed you had gone back inside to wait in the warm. But when I rang the brass doorbell and asked for you, your mother smiled her usual polite smile and informed me that you left thirty minutes ago with some friends.

That was the day I knew you would never love me the same way, and that you had never loved me the way I wanted you to.

I told myself that whilst I had spent my whole childhood waiting for you, you couldn't do the same for one day. I remember skipping school and walking to my fallen oak tree, I didn't feel anything, but the sensation of ice-cold tears rolling down my ruddied cheeks has never left me, not even all these years later. You didn't just leave me behind that morning, you left me with the realization that nothing I could do would make you understand, part of me felt angry for not storming into that tiny classroom and kissing you right then and there, its what I'd wanted to do for so, so long. That day was only worsened by the fact that my mother had uncovered my secret stash of magazine articles all dedicated to abolishing traditional views towards girls like me, she saw the word 'lesbian' and then saw red. The painful irony was, that if I hadn't been in such a rush to find my socks that morning, I would have remembered to put that damned box back in its secret hiding place, and my mother would never have known.

To say the least it was a wake-up call. The two women who I thought were supposed to love me more than anything had proved just how unlovable I was within a matter of hours. A few weeks after these revelations my feelings kicked back in; I was enraged, heart-broken, I felt I'd been betrayed. One Sunday, when my family was busy at church, I stuffed a small, leather suitcase full of clothes, books, and a single photograph. Then I left my home, not forgetting to scratch a somewhat graphic four-letter word into the fallen oak tree.

Looking back now, I know you had no idea of my true feelings towards you, I also now know that love can never be forced upon anyone, no matter how tempting it might be. So I wanted to apologize for never coming back, I like to tell myself that you might have missed me, but I stopped thinking for you a long time ago.

I fell in love with you when we were eight, I confessed to you when we were eighteen, and I spent the ten years in between waiting for you, and I always told myself you were just late to the idea of loving me back. But you can't be late for something that you were never aware of, which is why I left so suddenly that Spring, I went in search of a love that no one would have to wait for.