“But what inspires this particular compliment, this feeling of not just loving a song, or any work of art, but longing to have created it yourself? It happens when you identify so intensely with the work it feels wrong somehow - sad, almost- that is didn't come from your own brain. Like if you had arrived at this expression yourself, you would have more effectively metastasized the emotions that made you love the song so much.” — Holly Brickley, Deep Cuts
“When you want something you have no idea how to ask for, and no idea if it even exists” — Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life
I’m loungeing on a makeshift sunbed in the garden of my chilhood home, sitting softly on a slightly too-big throw I remember purchasing with apprehensive excitement the week before I started uni. I recall bundling it up in my arms like a baby and rushing it to the check-out, just one more thing I felt I was purchasing too late in a decision that wasn’t being made entirely by me; my mind driven by a motor at all times, my body always firmly two-steps in front of my brain.
It’s a sticky, sultry day and I’m heady with the excitement of a week of almosts. It’s exceptionally hot for mid-May, a welcome albeit terrifying change, and my skin is prickling as it’s gently touched with tiny bits of sun. My phone has been purposefully left inside, Emily Henry’s new novel is sitting perfectly in my lap (probably not helping matters) when I hear a voice coming from the other side of the fence, a male voice. It only takes me a few moments to realise it’s the neighbours gardener who I have seen and even waved a friendly hello to on occasion but as on this particular day he is sheilded by sunlight and the soft bamboo that separates her garden from ours, I let my mind wander. I imagine he’s somebody else, somebody I’ve grown strangely fond of despite never actually having met. Or, perhaps, he’s a complete stranger, someone of a similar age wearing muddy cargos and a backwards cap. Maybe he’s one of the popular boy’s from my year at school, all grown up and working for his families business. ‘Charlotte, I hardly recognised you!’ he calls as I wander over and give him an effortlesslty nonchalant wave in response.
This is what often happens if I’m left alone in my own head for a short while, with the false promise of a fresh start lingering on the other side of a locked gate. I turn completely delusional. I make up stories and meet-cutes in my head fit only for novels like the one that I was leafing through that day, the two protagonists almost in love but not quite, threatened and afraid and exillerated in those ways you only feel when you’re about to leave your heart in the hands of another for safe-keeping. In that deliciously sweet-spot of yearning I wished so badly to be in myself. As you might be able to tell from those two paragraphs, I’m not necessarily the person you would think should be given free-range of the likes of Hinge and Tinder (read: Hinge: The app designed to be deleted (and re-downloaded) by me, 50 times) But, active on the likes of Hinge and Tinder I am. And that’s why my phone was purposefully left inside that day. I was, once again, being ghosted. By a man I had never even met.
The thing is, I know now in the logical side of my mind (which is quite small) this man ultimately wasn’t right for me, but the sting when you’re in it is sharper than those the sun can leave on your skin after an exceptionally hot mid-May afternoon. It pinches and perferates and it leaves you questioning what it was that was the final straw, what it was that made them think ‘no, this isn’t the person for me’. After weeks of almost constant communication to replies that became slower and sloppier and impossible to comprehend as anything but disinterest. When you’ve already let your mind run away from you because you’re not as healed as you thought you were when the first message entered your inbox when you were bored one afternoon at work.
Of course I take it personally (I know I shouldn’t), of course I blame myself, reread messages and reinterpret them, marking them with mental red dots and question marks like I’m about to put a grade at the bottom. ‘Good attempt — maybe you’ll get there next time. C-’.
The thing is, I never seem to get there next time. No matter how much I try. Is there a quote that somebody said about that? If you grip onto something too tightly, it will break? Maybe it’s not meant for me. What if it’s not meant for me? What if I’ve spent my life so obsessed with this concept of love, romantic love specifically, that I’ve actually been pushing it further away from me with each rom-com I’ve cry-laughed at, each romance novel on my bookshelf that has a tear-stained final page?
The day I bought that too-big throw blanket, I was in love with a boy. He was sweet and sensitive and kind (as much as 18-year-old boys can be, anyway) and I was rushing the trip because I didn’t want to spend the day buying things that were synonymous with a life I would live without him. I wanted to get back to his blue bedroom and classic boy sheets and stupid posters and crawl under the duvet with him until Winter was over, until the first term of uni had been and gone, and it would be too late for me to leave. I wanted to stay frozen in September without him and I didn’t want to say goodbye.
Because a year earlier, in my seventeeth summer, this song came out. And I remember feeling like someone had forced two hands into my ribcage and squeezed as hard as they could. Because the boy I fancied, that same boy with the stupid posters and blue walls, didn’t like me back. Or, at least, I didn’t think he did at the time. We’d met at a blustery beach party after dark, shared a kiss and I hadn’t heard from him since. I was typing messages I knew I wouldn’t send, questioning if I’d ever get to experience love as my peers started to fall in and out of first relationships around me. It felt like the song had been picked straight out of my own brain.
So it’s definitely strange to listen to this song that was essentially the soundtrack to my adolescence and still relate to it, but in a more entrenched way now, I guess. Being a hopeless romantic as a 17-year-old girl is almost inevitable. Being one at 25, with a desire that burns as brightly as it did as a teenager for a life-changing love? When you’re not even sure if that exists anymore? Not so much.
Sending love to all my other hopeless romantics out there — despite everything, I don’t think I would actually want to be any different, and I hope you don’t too.
All my love,
Char x
Love it!! Never let go of being a hopeless romantic ! It’ll work out in the end ❤️🔥love ya xx
Loved this <3