Things I didn't know until I knew.
An essay about true love, and the stuff it wasn't.
Hi there, and welcome to another weekly edition of Extremely Online with Amelia.
As the title may have suggested, I’ll be sharing some insights into things I never learned in school today— things that took me 31 years to learn.
Please, pass the syrup… it’s about to get sappy up in here.
Things I didn’t know until I knew.
Kind of like feeling the sun hitting your face on the first day of an 80+ degree summer and not realizing until you’ve gone inside and stretched into a lazy afternoon nap that you’ve managed to burn your nose— that’s how I learned what infatuation felt like.
I hadn’t set out to fall asleep in the hammock, but I got caught up in its sway, anyway.
And then the deepening of the burning until I realized that it wasn’t just my nose that had been burnt, but my shoulders, my forehead, the backs of my arms.
If you’re lucky enough to have skin like mine, you’ll only burn once before it turns into a deep, golden brown— that’s how I learned what settling felt like.
And then, later in the summer, when you learn that a den of yellow jackets was right beneath you the entire time— that’s how I learned what colossal damage can be done to someone, or even to yourself, when you aren’t careful where you step.
Even if you tiptoe over the yellow jackets, one might still come out and kamikaze into your flesh when you least expect it.
But that’s not a reason to tiptoe across the Earth.
I’m more of the stomping through the mud and feeling the river wash over my toes kind of girl.
And that’s how I finally learned what it meant to be in love truly; when I stopped tiptoeing and letting bee stings scare me.
When I allowed myself to dive headfirst into a murky river (it had just rained the night before)— and to trust my knowledge of its depth to know that I wouldn’t come up dizzy and wounded.
Instead, I’d come out of the river cleansed of my past mistakes and infatuations, my flirtations with the thoughts of what true love should be.
Because that’s when I realized true love was already inside of me.
It was a peony waiting to explode in the middle of the night one May when its suburban owners were inside, tucked in their beds, fast asleep.
Perhaps the next day, one of them would notice it and take their shears to its stem and then present it with a smile and a kiss to the other.
That’s what waiting for my love to be matched in another felt like— like waiting to be picked, noticed, and selected for the beauty I’d unfurled in the night.
The first clue I should have had was when he offered me two ice creams— one was his favorite, and the other was for me— I teased him by saying that I wanted his, just a bite, and he handed me the entire pint.
Or maybe it was the bonfire in his backyard, with his family gathered around it. The Christmas tree they put on top went up in flames in the middle, shooting embers 30 feet into the sky— I felt him watching for my reaction to the magical— powerful— force of the fire in front of me, and I turned so I could watch him right back.
Like diving in— “three times, those are the rules”— to the ocean in late October and feeling refreshed, with only slight goosebumps on my skin to show that I was cold— but I wasn’t cold inside because I was bobbing there next to him.
And finally, I should have known when we went to move in together, with two sets of everything for the kitchen.
We still have two sets of everything because we’re both too afraid of hurting the other if we were to throw out something of meaning.
Since these mini-discoveries, I’ve come to a much greater conclusion.
True love is neither infatuation nor settling— it’s the somewhere in between, where I wake up and choose to laugh at his jokes, and he wakes up and chooses to tickle me until I get out of bed.
Both of us choose to go to sleep each night with his feet intertwined with mine because we both need space to stretch out but still want to know the other is there should we awake from our sleep.
It’s choosing each other, not for the beauty that has flourished on a single night but for the promise that the peonies will return year after year.
These are the things I didn’t know until I knew.
& Charles Oliver, I’m so happy to know you.
Beautiful. . .
So happy for y’all and you are both beautiful, inside and out!