Savannah Jaye

it’s the difference between leaving and being left that leaves me aching in the end, and even the act of coming is bittersweet with the knowledge of what succeeds. with each joyful reunion comes the promise of tears in a terminal.

for the first time in 8 months, i found myself at a place where everything begins and ends.

it felt a bit like shock therapy standing there, exposing myself again and again to the present pain, the trauma of your undeniable absence — waiting for my friend who was lost finding the exit, waiting anxiously for a semi-familiar face to walk out of that North Terminal Gate, waiting for a squeal and a run that i knew were to come.

while i was waiting i walked over to the seating area (you know exactly which one) and watched as lovers cried through their final goodbyes. i wanted to wish them luck but in the end it hit too close to home: i already knew their fate.

it’s really not all that ironic that a place meant for enthusiastic greetings is named after agonizing deaths.

you were less like a dictionary and more like a diary.
you were more like a poem and less like a prayer.

doodles and secrets and inspiration.
tiny lines and big scribbles.
post-modernism and symbolism.
grandiose claims and romantic gestures.

i would have been okay with it all too.
i wanted to breathe you in and never have direction again. 

Do you remember the last time we saw each other?

You held my hand and pulled me in.
Wrapping your arms around me.
Embracing me. Engulfing me.
Allowing us that one last moment of solidarity.

I recall breathing you in long and hard,
and thinking about how I may never get to smell your scent again.
Because I understood, even then, that it was our possibility.
Between my tears and heart breaks I tried my best to savor what was left of us.

And, after a time, I could feel you loosening your grip.
Feel you letting go. Feel you forming your final farewells.
And it was then that I first felt you slowly slipping from me,
as if you were an elusive fog that I knew I would never be able to catch up with again.

In this moment a normal girl would have let you go on your way.
She would have held back her tears long enough for you to be out of sight.
But I am not a normal girl, I am a lingerer.
And I will always be a lingerer.
So in that moment I resolved to do what it is that lingerers do best.
And I lingered.

Holding on for just a bit longer,
attempting to hide the last remaining tears with my head buried in your shoulder.
When I finally felt strong enough to release my clasp,
I was greeted with a kiss on the forehead and one last squeeze of my hand.
And there was your goodbye,
Almost oblivious to our too true future that we were accepting without so much as a fight.

The last time we saw each other you were standing on the other side of airport security, waving goodbye, with what appeared to be feet between us already feeling like millions of miles.

I have had three real, important, romantic relationships in my life.

The first was the boy who showed me I was capable of loving.
On our first date we bought fancy bottles of water and ate chips and salsa. We hung out every day straight for a month after that. He waited a week to hold my hand, and it was the longest week of my life. It would then be another two weeks before he’d build up the courage to kiss me. One night he dropped me off at my house after a date and I would never hear from him again. A kiss goodbye would be our final goodbye. I would never get an explanation or closure. I would just get a pillowcase soaked in tears. I would have dreary days and sleepless nights. I don’t believe I loved him, but I know I desperately wanted to love him one day. I wanted to support him and his dreams, and I wanted him to support me and mine.

The second was the boy who taught me to love.
We held hands before we even realized we had feelings for each other (I believe it was under the premise of keeping his hands warm) and the first time we kissed he was dating someone else. I honestly thought I loved him. I honestly wanted to love him. I honestly think he wanted to love me. I could say that our relationship failed because of miscommunication, mismatched personalities, or just because we didn’t try hard enough, but I know that when things were good they were actually great and that we tried harder than any relationship I’ve ever been a part of, romantic or otherwise. In the end we were just tired. Maybe it was giving up; maybe it was being honest. Eventually you just have to acknowledge that sometimes what you and yours want and expect from a relationship are just different things. Five days before we broke up I needed him and he wasn’t there, I kissed him and he didn’t kiss back, and I realized that loving someone wasn’t about all the things they did or didn’t do. However, I made this realization too late. After we broke up I moped about and cried “Woe is me!” I mistook fighting for loving and so in my retrospectives I told people that I had loved him. And, maybe, I did love emotionally. But I never, not for a second, loved him purposefully. Fighting isn’t loving. Fixing isn’t loving. Hanging in there isn’t loving. Acceptance is loving. Celebration, confrontation, and communication is loving. Understanding is loving.

The third was the boy who I loved.
I waited two months and he kissed me before he held my hand. Tonight I asked a friend of mine (who is madly in love with her current boyfriend might I add) if she loved any of the boys who she dated previously, and she bravely and honestly told me no, that she hadn’t. She said that there had been times where she thought she was in love, but looking back she understood the difference. I watched a movie last night that said the term “first love” must imply that there may also be a second or a third. I don’t know if one day I’ll meet a boy and I will be able to tell someone that what I thought was love was only the sum of foolishness and heartbreak or if I’ll be forced to spend the rest of my life confronting the fact that my first true love was also unrequited. Part of me hopes it is the prior and part of me hopes it is the latter. I desperately crave believing that there is somebody out there far better than what I know or can imagine. I also cling to the knowledge that he, and what we had, was special, and I never want to take that away. Maybe sometimes love is allowing someone the space to not love you back.

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if i had a hairy heart
would you still love me?
and if it were to be green,
could you still love me?

what if i had a zebra’s tail,
should you love me then?
and if it is a monkey’s,
will you still love me?

the reason i ask, you see,
is simply because you mean this much to me.
and just in case one day i may crack
i’d want to know this one sole fact:

can i let you mean this much to me?
and would you still love me if i had a hairy heart?

I wrote this poem in eleventh grade. I wrote it for a boy who had a reputation and was named after an adequate musician and a semi-famous surfing company. I had a nightmare one night the week before Christmas that he didn’t love me anymore and I woke up the next morning to discover that he, in fact, didn’t love me anymore. Despite that fact, I gave him his Christmas present that I had spent a month saving up for. The next month he came to my sixteenth birthday party and gave me a guitar pick. He never knew how to play guitar. He led me on. He dated other girls. He’d come back and “be my friend.” He transferred high schools. We stopped talking and it hurt. I thought that my life couldn’t exist without his friendship. I eventually hurt less. I forgot about him as much as one can forget. One day, years later, he added me on Facebook. He was living in another state, a high school dropout, getting ready to be a father. I denied the friendship request.

It had been exactly 3 days, 7 hours, 26 minutes, and 4 seconds since the last time we spoke. Since I pressed the send button on the text that was my definitive goodbye—asking you to respect my privacy and my need to heal. Telling you that I loved you and that I would always love you, but I couldn’t keep having my heart broken again and again. It wasn’t about what I wanted, but what I needed.

I was standing in Publix when I got the call that broke our vow of silence and before I even pulled the phone out of my pocket, I knew it was going to be you (you can blame it on my female intuition or your personalized ring tone). My stomach dropped, but not because I was angry that you didn’t respect my wishes. It dropped because I’m a girl, and at their core girls really just want to be pursued and chased after. My stomach dropped like an anchor and butterflies exploded throughout because I knew you were running after me, that our love had won out. You were calling to apologize and tell me that we could fix all of this. And in the .672 seconds it took me to whip out my phone and see your name, I released a breath of relief that I had been holding for days because I knew things were going to finally be okay again. There was hope and light at the end of this tunnel. I always said you were a keeper, after all.

Covering the speaker, I turned to my friend and mouthed, “It’s him.” before answering your call. “Heyy,” I said in the most calm-yet-alluring voice I could manage despite the fact that my heart was pounding out of my chest from nerves and excitement and elation. At first I could just make out the distorted sound of conversations in the background, but then I faintly began to hear the familiar voice of someone ordering from Waffle House, “Yeah, I’d like the All Star. Scrambled eggs with cheese. Bacon, but cooked lightly—I hate it burnt. The raisin toast. And I’d like my hashbrowns scattered, covered, peppered, and diced. Oh, and just a little crispy. Thanks.” I say hello again, this time a little louder but also with a little bit more confusion in my voice. It was met with the sound of ruffling fabric, a whispered “Oh, shit.”, and a click before the silence greeted me on the other end.

You had pocket dialed me.

And that night would be the second time in my life that I broke down and wept in a grocery store.

I met the most beautiful couple today. I listened to them talk about how they had known each other for three weeks when he proposed. I heard about how after they got married they flew to New Zealand and just began traveling—and then they never stopped. 8 kids, 38 years later, and countless countries later, they’re still madly in love.

After they were done telling us their story, they told us that they wanted us to know that love was possible. Not just the love that we write about every day, but the earth-shattering, knee-buckling, mind-blowing, every expanding love that we dream of.

We jokingly told them that they were setting our standards too high, and they said “Good, we should be.”

When we asked them the secret to their relationship, they shared with us about how they take time to celebrate their life together each Saturday morning (they were married on a Saturday) to go for walks or a long drive. But mainly they just spend that time dreaming, they told us. Dreaming of their future, of their kids’ future, of their grandchildren’s futures, but most importantly, dreaming of how they were going to change the world.

I honestly don’t know which is more inspiring: their love or their commitment to changing the world.

I want that love. I want to be in love with someone who dreams with me. And I want to be in love with someone who inspires me to change the world, even at 63.

Maybe the problem was that for just a second I actually believed it.

For a moment I allowed myself to think that I could be an exception to all of the rules that have been entrenched into society for centuries. I was the cyclist who left the helmet at home, the driver who forgot to buckle the seatbelt, the child who talked to strangers, and the girl who thought she was different.

The irony is, of course, that as soon as you begin to feel comfortable being the exception something comes along to remind you of why there was that rule in the first place. You’re no longer different: you are just like every other person that fell for that false sense of security over the ages.

What I’ve learned?

I don’t want to just be different anymore.

I wanted to be different because I thought that would make me important and special, and ultimately I all I ever really wanted was to feel like I could be important and special to someone, at some point. What I realize now though, is that I don’t need to be different to prove my worth.

But more importantly, I’ve discovered what we needed wasn’t for us to feel different than we had before, but for us to be different than who we were before.

3 years. 3 months. 3 weeks. 3 days. 3 hours. 3 minutes. 3 seconds. 3 words.

Sometimes I think I can’t remember anything and other times I seem to be incapable of forgetting anything.  Memory is a fickle being: haunting us with what we want to lose and taunting us with what we need to recall.

I can remember the day I was late for my first summer class (I always seem to be late for the beginning).  I can remember what you were wearing when you walked away from me. I can remember what you wearing every time you walked back. I can remember crying in the towel aisle of Wal-Mart.  I can remember every conversation about coming and going.  I remember begging you to stay. I remember asking you to leave.  I remember winning you back with a wistful smile. I remember giving you the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever given anyone and I remember it not meaning a thing to me. I remember Finding Nemo. I remember drunk text messages. I remember sitting in the poetry aisle of Barnes and Noble. I remember sitting out by the pool and talking about constellations. I remember all of our unexpected conversations and I remember how I felt after each of them. I remember sending postcards. I remember drum sticks and wrestling belts. I remember Dead Poets Society. I remember car rides. I remember plays and organ recitals. I remember you making me watch UP in 3D. I remember the absence of drunk text messages. I remember walks at twilight with more fireflies than I had ever seen before in my life. I remember every band you introduced me to. I remember the night my parents asked me how old you were. I remember the longest week before you held my hand. I remember watching Planet Earth. I remember the longest text message I’ve ever sent. I remember happy and I remember sad.

They say those that don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. Well, I can remember the first conversation we had and the last conversation we had, but no matter what I do I can’t seem to figure out what about our history I’m forgetting. So I’m still stuck on repeat: I was late for class that day, I was late for a bonfire, and I was late for church. I’m so sick of being late.

And, more importantly:
I want to keep them.

Every last one.