our way to fall

Even in my most cynical state I can listen to this song and remember how it felt to be fifteen again. Away from the phone and each other for the first time in the first three months of our dating, I covered a box with hearts and filled it with thirty-six notes. One note for each hour we'd be apart. How precious it all seems now, but at the time, those thirty-six hours felt like a lifetime. A year later, away from school for the day, he filled my locker with a handful of paper hearts, a bouquet of flowers, and the lines to my favourite song. I miss you I miss you I miss you so much.

At fifteen, the simple touch of a hand on a back could send my heart racing. At twenty-three, my heart has steadied and grown older and wiser and skips a beat less and less. But this song transports me back to that futon and that night and that first kiss that happened so fast and was so light I stood stunned afterwards, watching as he disappeared into the night, wondering if I had simply imagined it all. At fifteen, he was my wonderland of freckles bursting, and at twenty-three and with this song, I am still bursting.