Beloved

I first met Love in my sixth-grade home room. There were 30 other people there at that moment, but Love is the only one I can remember. The sight of him made my stomach clench, my mouth dry, and my heart tremble in my rib cage, like I had a terrible case of gas. So daily, I spelled out his name at the back of my notebook, many times over, like a prayer to a god, like a mantra you keep saying until it calms you down, until you forget your own name because you are so full of his.

There were many things then that I could not give Love, things so precious to me that I could not let them go. Instead, I gave Love my knee, my ankle, my shoulder, the sole of my foot. He took them, carried them in his hands for months, but gave them back eventually. Said he no longer needed them. But when he returned these parts of me, they were no longer in the same shape. They felt different—their weight, the feel of their edges on my fingers, different. Not long after, Love faded away slowly, like fog, like the mist of one’s breath on a window glass.

The second time I met Love, he looked so different, had a deeper voice, had dimples so deep that if I fell in, I couldn’t crawl back up. He belonged to someone else then, and he may not have recognized me as the same, but I kept every memory of him on every empty space I could think of. I kept the details of his hands, the way he smiled like sunsets, the way he laughed raindrops and breathed out flowers. I kept them on the spaces on my hands, on the blank pages of the journals I never get to finish writing on.

He existed in parts of me I never got to give—my nail beds, the hollow of my ear, the way I speak, and laugh, and sit. I never got to give him any physical part of my body; he asked for nothing. But I could have given him my hands. I could have given him my spine if he needed it. On days when he felt so small, and so scared, I could have given him my chest. Instead, I gave him poetry. Pages. Words. Even now, there are nights when I try to relearn the words that I gave away to Love, but it’s difficult to remember a language no one speaks anymore.

The third time I met Love, his hands were too rough against mine, his smile too far away. I told him things that I never had the courage to tell him before. I told him I could not hold the hand of another because I am too afraid to break it. I told him the things that hurt me, and he gave me his shoulder. He carried my secrets like Atlas carried the world. Love came, and tried to touch me in places no one had dared touch, but it was not the same. The parts of me that I gave away have lost their way back to me. And my hands still ache from when Love came the second time, a love I never got to call mine. I kept coming back. I kept remembering.

So Love left, not because he wanted to, but because he needed to. He left, stayed away for a long time, mending parts of him that I could not mend myself.

When Love comes back, maybe he will be the last person I will ever want to call Love. Maybe it will take many years before I discover the path that leads me to him. Maybe it will take him only months, days even, to come to me and say, “Let me be your home.” Maybe I will mistake one more person as him, before we find our way to each other. Maybe Love is 10 years older than me, or maybe 10 years younger. Maybe Love and I will grow silver hair together, or smile toothless smiles in family portraits surrounded by children with my eyes or his jaw line. Or maybe not.

I will meet Love again, perhaps in the most unexpected place. On the sidewalk on my way to posting a letter to someone else. In the subway on his way to a first date with someone else. On campus, while I sit on my favorite stone bench, while I watch strangers pass, not realizing that perhaps I have looked into his eyes. We may not even understand then why. We may not even know then, at that moment, that we belong to each other.

Maybe Love now speaks a language I cannot understand. Maybe he is holding someone else’s hand, or writing poetry about someone else. Or maybe Love is thinking about me, too, of when I will arrive at his doorstep with a promise of today, of when we will both be ready, of when we will not be afraid to give every inch of ourselves, of when we will finally call each other home.

Charmaine Louise Escalante, 20, is an accountancy student at Holy Angel University.