Day 32: To all the Boys who Broke my Heart: #2 (pt.2)

The Summer of Love. Those “Channel Orange” days. And it still hits the same. The anthem of my [all of our] juvenility. Ode to 2012, man. I remember when D.T.T. introduced me to Frank Ocean. It was around 4 in the morning —long distanced pillow talking. Those days when it was so hard to let go, the phone on speaker sufficed for the lack of their physical presence. I would lay him on my pillow next to me, every time. Those were sweet somethings. Unadulterated and genuine. And although it wasn’t meant to outlast the night sky I still treasure him for never pressuring me, abusing my flesh or being. We were never physical only emotional...

I have spent the past 10 years trying to recreate my first experience with love. Times when the moment was just free to be lived in as a never ending song. The moments when the music and the visuals line up just right and they become core memories. The definers of the quality of life when it’s all said and done. I only wanted to have a beautiful life— filled with beautiful moments all symbolically placed through my timeline as my only riches and inheritance. But I made my life hard by not being able to learn the lessons of love. My focus has always been in the now of love. Balance is what I seek, balance has always been unobtainable — until now.

But it was sweet. The innocence of it all. He stole my first kiss. We were in a movie theatre, on a youth trip to Cedar Pointe, he blindsided me. Called my name and when I turned my head — the quickest peck. But to me it was everything even if I never admitted it. He would say things that always stuck. Like my soft hands being a contributing factor in why he liked me. Calling me the girl of his dreams. Sweet somethings. It feels good to be with someone who can help boost your self esteem. But it was always the gaze for me. Stopping in the middle of a sentence to tell me how pretty I am. With a face that says he thoroughly examined the canvas before he spoke. I would bake him blueberry muffins and bring them to Tuesday nights. One Tuesday it was just us outside at the basketball hoop. I wish I could remember what we played for, but I gave him muffins and he gave me a beanie baby that was saturated with his cologne. We named him TJ. If I think hard enough I could get my hands on it right now— I miss sweet somethings. I was able to have child-like love and that is a privilege I value even a decade later.

One moment has the ability to pivot the trajectory of your life for years to come. I see how my heart never healed from the loss of my innocence. In every man after I sought to reactive the experience but the aspect of physicality always tainted it. But the experience was my Shirley Card for navigating men. Does it feel familiar? The slightest bit yes and I was all in. I didn’t even realize how embedded that experience was into my subconscious. Our ending came by way of being children who didn’t know how to communicate. I told him “I didn’t care”, and he believed me. Taught me that some things just aren’t worth saying just because you want attention. It happened during our last cellular nightcap. That same night, my Uncle Marvin died. I laid in bed, heartbroken, unable to sleep, when my dad opened the door like he usually would to wake me for school. “Morgan, your Uncle Marvin passed away last night.” I can still hear him saying it. My heart at 15 didn’t know how to process both loses at once. I didn’t know how to process the loss of someone I’d never missed before. Especially because I never really knew them even though they had such an impact on my life indirectly. Losing my uncle was sad for me and a shock to the system for my family. My mom was broken, my cousins were just in HS, it was a devastating time. But It was a soul crushing loss for me to lose him and it be “my fault”. My family grew to heal, I think my Granny struggles to balance both loses of children and I got caught up in a loop of insanity. Never really learning from one man to the next.

Just swapping their faces in the locket.