Sometimes people find someone who will last a lifetime. They put a smile on your face and a flutter in your heart and you just can’t imagine waking up next to anyone else in your whole life. They give you hope that your future might just be filled with the kind of love that sparkles with more iridescence than beaded dew on morning leaves. They make you feel like the luckiest person in the world because you think you might have found that elusive, god-like lover that is called a soulmate.
Sometimes I question myself. I’m sixteen and things change and hearts get broken, thrown out with the trash on Tuesday morning. People stop caring and stop calling and stop reserving that place in their hearts for you. They stop holding you and their eyes crystallize with a thousand lies and they say I’m fine. And you hold on to those times when you held each other and the sunlight played across their features and you stared into their eyes and you thought, man, this is it.
Please don’t do that to me.
I hope and pray that we don’t end up brokenhearted, separated, chewed up and spat out and exhausted by the system. I pray that we don’t stop holding each other like we’re the only people left in the world. I pray that you don’t stop treating me like your queen and I pray that I never forget that you are one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. I pray that my reflection in your green eyes is never replaced by someone else. I pray that you never stop loving me. I pray that we will make it through the distance and the rough times and the hard work. Because it’s going to be hard work. We’re going to be broke and starving and exhausted and waiting for the next cheque. We won’t have it easy; we never have and never will. But what we end up with? What we’ll have worked for, with all the strength in our shaking hands? That will be ours. All ours. We’ll have each other to lean on and cry with and love. We’ll have each other to paint new apartments with and dance around like crazy people to blaring music. We’ll have each other to hold when we’re exhausted, and I pray that you’ll never let go of me.
Please never let go of me.
Our future will be hard, but it will be our future. All ours. This is our kingdom, this is our country. And our palace might start as a fixer-upper on nothing like those Upper East Side, romantic comedy streets, but it will be our palace to dance in. And I’ll have you to dance with.