While reading this post, i would love if you could listen to this song.
If my life were a movie, the title would be Being 17. Not because that was the best year of my life, but because everything seemed louder, deeper, and more alive at seventeen. The dreams, the heartbreak, the hope — they all felt bigger than me.
I picked up an old journal yesterday while cleaning up my room. This journal dates back to four years ago. I kept it aside because even though I was curious to know who I was two years ago, I wasn't ready to dive headlong into the past. Safe to say, I was a bit scared of knowing who I was back then.
Today though, I felt this intense urge to read it and I was brave enough to listen to my urge. The journal smelt exactly how old books do; like dust and time and oddly comforting things. There was also the lingering scent of something that I couldn't quite place. Something beautiful and sacred.
This four year old journal was filled with writings of a naive seventeen-year-old girl who had these hopes and dreams and desires. Going through my scribblings, I realized that I was once a teenager who used to be filled with wonder and excitement about the world. One thing I desired most back then was to love and be loved. I still desire it. I had watched tons of Disney movies and read romance books with the plotlines where princesses were in distress and a prince swooped in to save them or plotlines where despite obstacles, the protagonists always worked things out and their love always survived. They beat the villains and got to live and love happily ever after.
I was seventeen. I wanted that for myself too. A love that defied all odds. A love that survived. A love that was real. I would write of how I wanted my prince charming would look like. I had a list of all the attributes I wanted him to possess. Chocolate and caramel-skinned, a smile that crooked up slightly on one side, tall, kind, patient. Fortunately and unfortunately for my seventeen-year-old self, she met a prince that looked like her prince charming and she thought it was fate. But oh, no… he did not have the attributes. He wasn't who she thought he was. He was all jagged and sharp edges. And those edges left marks. He broke her heart in ways that even if they were pieced back, she would have a hard time believing she was whole. He was her first love and he taught her so many things she never expected to learn quite early. Lessons about trust, heartbreak and how love or the lack of love could change you.
My seventeen-year-old self grew up and became me. Over time, I have become someone else. Stronger, maybe. I have become someone that realizes that people might not show up how I want them to be. No one is going to swoop me off my feet and whisk me away into the sunset. I have become someone who romanticizes love, yet don't believe that it can truly happen to me. I am not as naive as before because I have come to realize that the love I want might or might not exist out there. The chances of it not existing are 90% higher than 10. I have come to accept that love is complicated, and sometimes it hurts more than it heals.
I have seen enough to realize that most of us are just walking sadnesses — the villains in our stories. Without meaning to, we carry heartbreaks in our hands and offer it to others like it's love. But even with all I have learnt and all I have lost in my bid to love and be loved, I still want to give my seventeen-year-old self the one thing she held onto so tightly— hope. I still want to believe that what she longed for might still be possible, even if the chances are very slim. That the kind of love she dreamed of, still exists somewhere.
Maybe not the perfect love she envisioned, but something real, steady and kind. I haven't stopped looking, because even if I don't believe in fairytale loves or gettng it right at the first try, I believe in trying again. I believe in being chosen fully and wholeheartedly without doubt, even when it's hard. I believe in walking intentionally into loving someone and staying there. I believe that the love I want is still out there, not just for seventeen-year-old me but for the woman I’ve become. And if it exists, if there's just a small chance that it exists, I owe it to both of us to keep believing.
Thanks for reading.💞✨
All images are mine