High School Romance

There’s this couple. I pass them every day on my walk out to the bus. They strike me as so odd and notable, but it’s rather hard to describe why. The girl is Caucasian. She’s blond with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and sea green eyes. She’s almost always wearing her hair in a ponytail and more often than not, in athletic looking sweatpants. (Her legs, not her hairdo.) She’s usually smiling and radiating warmth impossible to capture with merely a pen and paper. She’s very petite, probably 5 foot, yet there appears to be so much of her, fairly spilling out, it would seem, seeping out of her lovely eyes and warm freckly smile. Her boyfriend (or at least, by the way she gazes at him in total adoration, I ASSUME he is her boyfriend…) is Asian. He’s got the Bieber, but in black. He has Carmel colored skin and ear buds perpetually in. He’s always wearing a hoodie and he’s about her height.

They stand on a grassy patch every day after school, by a row of buses. They look into each other’s eyes, beaming with puppy love. They’re freshmen, judging by their height. There’s an innocence, a shyness in which they say “I love you.” It was imperceptible at first, but I remember about a week ago, when I first heard them laughingly exchange the words. Her eyes lit up as she said them, totally caught up in him, not paying attention to the sea of people surging past them, not caring who heard.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this. At first glance at this couple, I was struck by a sort of relative amusement…like, how can kids barely out of middle school experience love? That’s silly…I mean, they’re so YOUNG.

Their inherent innocence struck me as volatile, the vulnerability of the two freshmen was apparent to everyone to passed them, to all of us who saw them, and like me, secretly smiled to themselves and thought “How naïve.”

I’ve let that phrase germinate within me for a while. Is young love really so naïve? Or is it merely natural? Or is there something mature and prepossessing about them incomprehensible in my arrogance of assuming their love was any less real because of their age? How silly and immature of me to think such a thing when I’m barely a few years older.

I wonder some days about the warmth of that freshman girl. There’s a fierceness, a freshness, something very naïve and trusting about it. I wonder if when he breaks her heart or she breaks his that that warmth will fade? One day, I imagine, they’ll become a jaded about love and relationships and general….I suppose…someday, all good things come to an end…that trust they have in each other, in humans will disappear like evaporating tear drops and they’ll lose that innocence they radiate so strongly. That’ll be a shame…