Entry No. 3
Age 12
Remembering the first time I tried to define love
The first poem I ever wrote came from a seventh grade English class at Greenwood Middle School. The details around the assignment are gone. What stayed was the poem itself, or at least the part of it that mattered enough to remember.
“Love is like a flower, it takes time to bloom.
It rises like the sun and falls like the moon.
Love is like a roller coaster, it has its ups and downs.
It can take you very high and go around and around.”
That is all I can recall.
Reading those lines now does not make me cringe or laugh at how young I was. The reaction is quieter than that. It brings up a question that lingers longer than expected. How did a twelve year old already know to describe love as something that moved, shifted and required patience?
At that age, love already felt like a process instead of a promise. It came across as something that changed rather than something fixed. The poem was not reaching for fantasy or romance. It was trying to explain motion. Rise and fall. Ups and downs. Patterns.
That realization lands differently at forty six.
Children who grow up surrounded by steadiness usually do not spend time defining love. They live inside it without needing to analyze it. When a child starts breaking love down into metaphors, it often means observation is happening. Attention is being paid. Something is being studied, even if the child does not yet understand why.
At the time, the poem felt simple. Writing what felt true was the only goal. Looking back, it reads less like imagination and more like awareness. There was already an understanding that love was not static and that it asked something of the people inside it.
That early poem also makes something else clear. Reflection did not arrive later in life. The habit of noticing patterns was already there. Emotional shifts were already being tracked. Meaning was already being questioned, even if the language was still forming.
There is no neat conclusion attached to this memory. No lesson wrapped up with a bow. The moment simply raises a question that feels worth sitting with.
What do we learn early that does not make sense until much later?
And how much of who we are now showed up long before we knew how to name it?
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