Unteachable

by Leah Raeder

I’m not going to do the whole roller-coaster/falling-in-love metaphor. I didn’t fall in love with him up there. Maybe I fell in love with the idea of love, but I’m a teenage girl. This morning I fell in love with raspberry jam and a puppy in a tiny raincoat. I’m not exactly Earth’s top authority on the subject.

That’s another thing about lies: if you convince yourself they’re true, they become true. A lie is a discrepancy of belief, not fact.

There’s something so beautiful waiting for you. Don’t run from it. Run toward it.

I didn’t feel completely corporeal. My body felt like layers of tulle, gauzy approximations of a girl. Air moved through me and drenched me with oxygen.

This is what being in love feels like, Wesley. Gratitude. Gratitude that you exist in this fucked-up, beautiful universe.

We get bigger, and older, but part of us always retains that small rabbit heart, trembling furiously, secretively, with wonder and fear. There’s no irony in it. No semantics or subtext. Only red blood and green grass and silver stars.

“That’s all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.”