If Love Was A Lesson They Taught In School
If love was a lesson they taught in school, you would have learned how to brace yourself for the impact, for the wreckage. You would have learned contingency plans, fire escapes for the spark. You would have learned how to survive the fall, how to connect without being destroyed, how to give without emptying yourself into hollow homes.
If love was a lesson they taught in school, you would have learned how to handle the leaving, how to swallow the goodbye. You would have learned how to avoid breaking your teeth on excuses, you would have mastered the ability to rub their memory from the backs of your eyelids.
See, if love was a lesson they taught in school, you would have learned how to pick them out of your hair, how to figure out what parts of yourself were yours before they crashed into you. If love was a lesson they taught in school, you would have learned how to gather hope within your fingertips, how to tuck strength between your bones, how to push yourself toward healing — how to forget.
Instead, you are here. You learned how to calculate math equations before you knew what it was like to taste youth on the lips of another. And you know every state in the continental US, but you don’t even know how to navigate the brokenness within your chest. You learned how to determine the square root of sixteen, but you still can’t figure out a way to get to the root of who you are without them. You can sit through a whole lecture on the human body, but you can’t figure out how to get your heart out of your throat, how to calm the rush, rush, rushing of the blood in your veins whenever you hear their name.
If only. If only love were a lesson they taught in school, because during your final lecture you would have learned that love did not always end in hurt, did not always end in destruction. You would have learned that love had the ability to be this big, inspiring thing; this energizing, stunning work of growth and passion in your life. If love was a lesson they taught in school, you would have learned how to hope again, how to believe, that people have the ability to care just as deeply as you do — that people don’t always leave.