The Child At Heart.

The other day my sister told me she didn't believe in love.  Something expected from a girl who has been left to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders alone, who is certain that she would sleep into bed with no one to sleep beside her. A girl who's heart never fully heals before it's mangled and broken again.

I sat there surprised, sad almost because she is none of those following things. She is a pre-teen girl who sometimes follows a path that is crooked - yet still,she has never let anyone hold her heart long enough to be let down or know what it feels like to have acid living in your chest.

The scars she keeps are nothing more than tiny traces caused by minuscule bumps in the road - they are soft, pink and pale. Not like the scars some of us are forced to carry inside out clenched fist : red and raw, if we touch something too hard for too long, they sting.

You're young, that's when you're supposed to believe in love the most, I remember thinking. That's how it is for most of us, or at least for me.

We become obsessed with the characters played on the large screens, envious, because we want to be loved - we wanted every piece of ourselves to be desired. And Imma not talking in the morning-after-sex hair or wet inner thighs kind of way.

We wanted someone to memorize the lines in our palms, to notice the tiny beauty marks that scatter across our skin, to tell us how many eyelashes we have because we never bothered to count, to notice the little whimsy details about ourselves. 

Then we get older and realize how flawed love can be. We are either too much, or not enough, we give everything, but there's nothing for us to take in return. We become broken pillows soaked in salt water. We talk to walls because you're not there to listen anymore. We eventually get bitter after several failed attempts of taking the plunge to eternal happiness.

We rub the sleep from our eyes and see reality for the first time, we come to the conclusion that nobody really stays together anymore.

Somehow I feel like maybe I never grew up, because I can still feel it there. Love at times impossible, does wonderful things, even if some of us never get the chance to experience it, for a fleeting moment if we stood still long enough, we can feel it in us. When I dream, I see stars. I can feel them, brush over them with my fingertips and sometimes they even get stuck in the dark tangles of my hair. But when I wake up, I can still feel their glow in my veins, that maybe the sparks of the light exist inside of me and that I had it all along. The quicken heartbeats and all that jazz.

I don't know, I think regardless of whether one believes in love or not, we still have that glimmer of living inside of us at the private dark lit corners of our hearts - proof that is is concrete, even if only briefly, even if we don't always see it or believe it is there. 

We always hope.

Maybe that means that most of us never really grow up at all, that maybe we just pretend to.