Reflections on Seventeen (I)

      Ten years ago, I was seventeen years old. But while my birthday was in August, I don't think I really turned seventeen until that January. I don't know why -- the first few months just felt like sixteen still, I guess. I more than made up for it though. I was seventeen for three years.

      Seventeen was the first time I was able to hold two contradictory emotions in my heart at the same time. I was so unsure of everything, so untrusting, and yet at the very same time, I believed in one thing with all of my being. And that was that the Long Lost would always love me.

      It's crazy, isn't it? Love can be so transient, people so faithless, and yet there I was. So sure. So beautifully, heartbreakingly sure. Sure that he would always be there. Sure that I would always have him. I never contemplated any other possibility because I couldn't. It was beyond even my own overactive imagination. The suggestion was as laughable as the Earth ceasing to spin, and to me, equally impossible.

      I was wondering tonight when the exact moment was that I stopped being seventeen. I think it was a couple weeks before my twenty-first birthday. And I'm not sure...not sure if the he loved me anymore at that point.

      Maybe he did. Things got a little better after all, but better wasn't the same. Better wasn't seventeen. It was different. Older. Harder. Completely uncertain. I wanted it that way back then. I don't know why -- maybe I thought it was exciting to be so unsure.

      I miss it now. Not him, necessarily, but seventeen. That prolonged moment in time when two contrary beliefs could live side-by-side inside of me.