When you were seventeen, you fell in love.

I could tell by the language of your letters, those little notes you passed each other with hurried hands in the hallways.  Valentines with red roses imprinted on the front, signed off with sweeping Xs and Os.  Lengthy, cursive confessions of flowery feelings I never really understood, but venerated nonetheless.  I thought, after all, that I would grow to understand.  That one day, I’d be just like you: seventeen and in love.

It was an aesthetic daydream, me and hypothetical him, though he never had a name or a face.  My mind never permitted me to think that far.  It wandered toward other, more interesting images instead.  Magic and mythology, laying on soft snow, discovering the secrets of the deep sea.  I never worried.  My time would come when I turned seventeen, and I fell in love, just like my mom and dad did.  Just like my neighbors did, and my cousins, and the kids I saw outside the high school holding hands.

I turned twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and I started to realize that most kids didn’t wait until they were seventeen to fall in love.  I observed my friends’ blushing faces and nervous giggling when the object of their affections bumped into them in class, and I listened giddily when they described how their heart fluttered every time they passed them by.  Their words reminded me of your letters.  _Pretty eyes, stunning hair, liking, hoping, loving._  Like a parrot, I mimicked their actions, refusing to acknowledge the fact that it felt unnatural.  I was a little mermaid trying to live on land because I liked the shiny trinkets there.  I liked the love I read about in your letters.

But my love still felt like yellow roses, not red; arms linked, not hand in hand; hugs but never kisses.  No matter how hard I tried, I could not feel the way you did.  It depressed me at first, but I did begin to erase the impossible future I had drawn out for myself.  A wedding dress, a picture-perfect proposal, being young and in love.

I didn’t know it, but it was one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.  Your kind of love is beautiful; I still think that.  I know that.  But it’s just not for me, Mom. 

I’m finally seventeen now, and I’m not in love.  I’m not in love, but my heart still stirs for the earth, for learning, for adventure.  For the way the trees whisper in the winter, the way numbers of unimaginable quantities seem to click into countless calculations, the way dissonant chords ring bright in my brain.  For this incredible cosmic symphony with all its differences and irregularities that are all so imperfectly beautiful.  You know, there was a time when being seventeen and not in love seemed like the end of the world. Now I know it’s just the beginning of a life I can explore and make my own.  

I’m seventeen, and I’m not in love. But I am happy.  And that’s enough.