dusting off the fools heart

Many aspects of my teenage years were rough...some of the roughest i've had. Sometimes i marvel that i survived when i think of all the drugs i did and stupid circumstances i placed myself in. A few sexual assaults, a couple bad car wrecks, bulemia, beaten up, caught stealing...you name it, i stumbled through it. When i met Aaron we were all of 15 years old. This high school was the millionth school i'd been to. I had just about zero social skills.As an only child that moved around all my life, my survival mechanism was to just get through it, don't even try to engage it. My home life was a mess as my mom had just hooked up with this new guy and was busy having his babies. He was an asshole, alcoholic, abusive...to be avoided, to say the least.

Teenagers have so much to digest, and all those hormones runnin' around. Still very much children but busting at the seams with independence and angst driven desire. just beginning to understand whats wrong and right with the world and what their place is in it.

Aaron was a gift the universe handed my battered cynical young self. He treated me so kindly, something i'd never known. It quickly became that gloriously self absorbed nonstop adrenaline high of first love. No past relationships to have learned anything from, no point of reference, no caution flags for unhealthy boundaries or bad communication or codependancy, no no...just unfettered full on heartbreaking indulgence. Just the disraction one needs to get through.

For the first time ever...someone had my back. someone thought i was...well...someone. For a window of time, it was us vs. the world.we'd skip outta school and head back to his dad's empty place to have clumsy, heated, learning the ropes sex. We'd run through rainy streets and sleep in parks rather than head to our seperate homes. We'd spend countless hours in all night coffee shops...dreaming,doin' whatever...didn't matter.
I soaked this up like rain to parched earth.
He was always warm to my cold frame.
I thought he was the most beautiful thing i'd ever seen.This momentum lasted quite a while for our age. We broke up and got back together too many times to count...always with much well rehearsed dramatic impact. The first time we split i stayed sleepless and locked away in my bedroom listening to U2 over and over just crying and crying. I would surely die from grief....since i would never eat or sleep again.

Somewhere along the time line we grew up. That well simply ran dry. But still i keep that precious, naive and lovely lust of youth buried deep against my rib cage....safe from everything thats piled up inside me since. It remains soft and open up against adulthoods hardening logic and weathered wisdom. Its my fools heart, my point of reference, a gift from the universe.




**thanks to aaron for contacting me, inspiring me to write this and giving his permission to be on this blog for all the world to see.