WE FALL IN LOVE, BUT ONLY ONCE IN OUR LIVES. THAT’S IT. ONCE IT ENDS (BECAUSE INEVITABLY, IT ALWAYS ENDS), WE SPEND THE REST OF OUR LIVES TRYING TO RE-CREATE THE MAGIC.

Eternal Adolescence

ALBERTI ROMANI · 25 min read · Aug 5, 2020

(Pre-pubescent) ALBERTI ☆ ROMANI falls in love, has his young heart broken, gets a song stuck in his head for the next forty-odd years, and learns a very important lesson: We all fall in love, but only once. After that, we spend the rest of our lives trying to re-create the magic.

Truth

We fall in love, but only once in our lives. That’s it. Once it ends (because inevitably, it always ends), we spend the rest of our lives trying to re-create the magic. I know what you are thinking: This guy is a cold-hearted cynic. Somebody incapable of seeing light and beauty in the world. Well, you are wrong.

I’m a die-hard romantic

This is the story of my very first love, the kind of world-tilting, heart-in-your-throat romance that ruins you for anyone else in the most beautiful, devastating way possible. Consider this my ultimate thesis, a desperate confession written in ink and lingering heartache, proving exactly why a love like this can only ever happen to you once. When you are that young, before you learn to build walls or play games, your soul is completely unbruised—wide open, fearless, and waiting to be claimed. Everything that happens after that first, catastrophic heartbreak is nothing more than a futile, lifelong scavenger hunt to recapture a magic that only exists in the absolute certainty of youth.

You spend years chasing ghosts, trying to resurrect that pristine innocence, searching for a replica of the exact way the air smelled like impending rain and cheap cologne the second they looked at you. You listen to endless playlists, praying to find a melody that echoes the invisible, electric music that used to hum between you when your shoulders accidentally brushed in the hallway. But you can never quite replicate the sheer, unadulterated panic of those sweaty, trembling palms, the violent flutter of a million frantic butterflies colliding in your stomach, or the deafening rhythm of two hearts beating so wildly you swear the whole world can hear them. And no matter how many lips you press yours against for the rest of your life, you will forever be haunting the memory of that very first kiss—soft, clumsy, breathless, and tasting of pure, terrified electricity and the sweetest, most blinding promise of forever.

If you look at any history textbook, they will tell you that 1989 was a monumental, earth-shattering year in human history, the kind of year where the tectonic plates of the world finally shifted and nothing would ever be the same again. It was a time of epic, sweeping transformations that felt almost as unpredictable and volatile as the chaotic, terrifying rush of growing up. Far away in Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution was already underway, a beautiful, breathless rebellion of people deciding they were finally done being held down in the dark.

Across the globe, the USSR finally pulled out of Afghanistan, laying down their weapons and walking away after ten grueling, heartbreaking years of protracted war, leaving behind a sudden, fragile silence in the aftermath of so much destruction. And in a monumental leap toward hope, newly-elected South African Prime Minister F.W. de Klerk began the seemingly impossible task of dismantling apartheid—a profound, agonizing process of tearing down decades of walls that would ultimately culminate in Nelson Mandela rising triumphantly as the very first democratically elected leader of South Africa on May 10th, 1994. To the rest of the planet, it was a breathless year defined by falling empires, impossible victories, and old, suffocating regimes crumbling to dust to make way for a radically new, wide-open reality.

The Berlin Wall, a towering, insurmountable symbol of division that had kept people apart for decades, finally fractured and fell to the earth in a storm of broken concrete and reckless hope, proving that even the most impenetrable barriers eventually break. Soon after that monumental collapse, the seemingly invincible USSR completely ceased to exist, dissolving like a fading memory and erasing an entire global superpower from the map almost overnight. It was a sudden, earth-shaking unraveling that plunged most of its former republics and much of Eastern Europe into a dizzying, unprecedented period of wild, chaotic democracy. It was an era defined by breathtaking vulnerability, a time when entire nations were forced to step out from beneath rigid, suffocating control to navigate a terrifyingly wide-open world, leaving behind a legacy of beautiful, messy, and permanent upheaval—the rippling, unpredictable results of which are still deeply felt and seen today.

But for a fourteen-year-old boy standing on the sun-drenched, southeastern shores of Hispaniola, the violent shifting of global superpowers meant absolutely nothing. When you are that young and standing on the terrifying, exhilarating precipice of your very first love, the world outside your immediate periphery simply ceases to be real. As far as I was concerned, those massive, earth-shattering historical events might as well have taken place on the desolate, red dust of Mars, or on some cold, forgotten rock floating blindly at the absolute farthest reaches of the GN-z11 galaxy.

The collapse of empires

The collapse of empires and the birth of new democracies were just invisible, silent echoes in the dark expanse of space, entirely irrelevant to the sudden, all-consuming gravity taking hold of my life. My universe was no longer measured by political revolutions or continents dividing; it was measured entirely by the sticky Caribbean heat, the rhythmic crashing of the ocean, and the agonizing, beautiful realization that my own private world was about to be irreversibly altered by a force far more powerful than history itself.

Yes, Sir, in the early, blooming spring of 1989, a completely unsuspecting Berto—the wide-eyed, pre-pubescent iteration of ALBERTI ☆ ROMANI—was hopelessly, catastrophically in love. It was the kind of all-consuming, bulletproof euphoria that makes a teenage boy feel utterly invincible, rewriting the very laws of his reality overnight. There was no tropical storm, no violent Caribbean hurricane, no torrential downpour dark or heavy enough that could have ever dared to cloud his radiant, blinding sunshine.

As far as his deeply smitten, dizzyingly overwhelmed mind was concerned, the sprawling population of the entire universe had been instantaneously reduced to exactly two breathing, feeling people: him, and the singular, magnetic object of his considerable affections. The bustling island streets, the loud neighbors, the towering sugar mills—they all faded into a blur of irrelevant background noise the second she entered his line of sight. Up to that exact, life-defining point in his young existence, she was not just a girl from across the street; she was a walking, breathing miracle. She was, without a single shred of doubt, simply the most breathtakingly beautiful creature God had ever deliberately placed upon His lush, green, coconut-palm-covered Earth: Isabella.

Luego del colegio siempre me esperaba [ella]….por ese camino largo en el amanecer…con sus manos blandas hacia barcos de papel…hoy recuerdo a tu risa de [niña] como ayer¹

Isabella had only recently moved in directly across the dusty, sun-baked street from our house, a sudden, miraculous arrival that instantly turned my otherwise mundane neighborhood into the vibrating, inescapable center of my entire universe. She had come to live with her father, Francisco, her stepmother, Rosalia, and her stepbrother, Edgar—a quiet, blended family that unknowingly brought with them the absolute and permanent destruction of my boyhood peace of mind. Out of everywhere in the sprawling world they could have settled, fate had placed her agonizingly close, just a stone’s throw from my front door, where I could casually trace the morning light as it hit her windows. They occupied a tight, cramped space in what the locals unofficially, and somewhat derisively, knew as Batey Bobea.

It was far from a palace fit for the radiant creature I believed her to be; rather, it was a rundown, weathered row of single-story, two-room apartments where the peeling paint baked under the oppressive Caribbean sun and the walls seemed far too thin to hold the heavy, suffocating weight of ordinary life. Owned by the locally prominent Bobea family, the humble, dilapidated structure stood in stark, almost poetic contrast to Isabella’s effortless perfection. Yet, the very moment she stepped onto the cracked concrete of that modest property, those worn-down apartments were instantaneously transformed in my completely lovesick eyes, becoming a sacred, glowing sanctuary simply because she slept, laughed, and breathed inside their walls.

The Bobeas, by stark contrast to the rest of our wonderfully chaotic, sun-baked neighborhood, were undeniably one of the wealthiest, most quietly imposing families on our entire block. They seemed to exist in a sort of pristine, isolated bubble of old island money and unspoken authority, a deeply entrenched status strictly maintained by the family’s formidable patriarch, Mr. Bobea. He commanded a quiet, lingering respect as the proud proprietor of a remarkably high-end bespoke tailoring shop situated over on Calle Frey Juan de Utreras, tucked neatly away not too far from the bustling, vibrant heart of Parque Duarte in the city’s downtown area.

But their untouchable, almost cinematic aura wasn’t solely derived from the crisp rustle of their quiet riches, their absolute, unquestioned ownership over the dilapidated Batey Bobea, or the fact that they reigned over our humble street from inside the grand, sprawling, lime-green house that sat out front like a watchful, brightly-colored sentinel. No, aside from all of their obvious material wealth, they held another striking, almost surreal distinction that immediately set them entirely apart from the rest of us: in a tropical world beautifully painted in rich, warm hues of mahogany, copper, and bronze, they were some of the absolute whitest people my young, wildly observant eyes had ever seen. They seemed to effortlessly defy the fierce, relentless Caribbean sun, possessing a pale, striking complexion that made them look like displaced, aristocratic royalty in a neighborhood otherwise overflowing with deep, vibrant local color.

Don’t get me wrong, the sight of stark European features is by no means some strange, inexplicable anomaly on our sun-drenched island—in fact, it is quite the exact, undeniable contrary. This is a place where the heavy, inescapable weight of history doesn’t just live in the dry, fading pages of school textbooks; it flows hot and restless through the very veins of the people who walk these humid, cracked streets. Long before I was just a boy hopelessly drowning in the dizzying, overwhelming depths of his first great teenage love, our home was already the epicenter of an epic, world-shattering collision of entirely different universes.

It was right here, crashing against these exact, brilliant blue shores, that Christopher Columbus first arrived on a fateful December 25th, 1492, forever shattering the quiet, sacred isolation of the New World. He didn’t just casually drop anchor; he claimed it, violently carving our beautiful island into the sprawling maps of empires and using it as the ultimate, indispensable staging ground for the sweeping, ruthless conquest of the Americas. Because of that grand, bloody, and sprawling history, the ghosts of the Old World have lingered here for centuries, deeply and permanently weaving their pale complexions, distant bloodlines, and restless ambitions into the rich, vibrant, and heartbreakingly beautiful tapestry of the Caribbean.

You can still physically reach out and touch the heavy, ancient history of this place in the crumbling, overgrown ruins of Fuerte de la Navidad, the rudimentary, weather-beaten fort violently founded by those restless Conquistadores immediately after they dragged their heavy wooden ships onto our rugged northwest coast. Because of that brutal, world-altering arrival, the island didn’t just inherit their language, their religion, or their fading, blood-stained flags; it inherited their very biology.

Today, running quietly beneath the warm, sun-kissed skin of the locals, there is an enormous, sprawling admixture of European-born alleles deeply and permanently embedded within the complex bloodlines of the present-day population. It is a vast, invisible genetic mosaic, a silent, cellular testament to love, conquest, and survival that heavily dates back over 500 long, chaotic years. For five centuries, generations upon generations have continuously collided, loved, and blended under this same sweltering Caribbean sun, intricately tangling their ancestral roots together until the entire island evolved into a breathtakingly beautiful, vibrant melting pot of shared, interwoven humanity.

But what truly made the Bobeas stand out—what cast them as surreal, spectral outliers in our vibrant, sun-drenched landscape—was the startling, almost defiant absence of any Taino, West-African, or South Asian ancestry within the hidden depths of their tightly guarded family tree. In a corner of the world where identity is a beautiful, chaotic collision of centuries and cultures, their lineage remained a frozen, porcelain portrait of another time and place, seemingly untouched by the rich, mahogany reality of the island that bloomed just beyond their doorstep.

For their complexions to remain so stubbornly pale and their features so strictly European, there would have had to be a deliberate, concerted effort spanning generations to shy away from the local color, a quiet but firm rejection of the gorgeous, swirling melting pot we all called home. It suggested an insular, almost gothic history of closed doors and whispered secrets, implying a family tree that didn’t so much branch outward into the world as it curled obsessively back in on itself, favoring a tradition of quiet, internal unions that prioritized a fragile, ancestral purity over the wild, breathtaking diversity of the Caribbean, eventually leading one to the unspoken, unsettling realization that such a preserved legacy could only be maintained through an incredible amount of inbreeding.

According to the whispered secrets Isabella shared with me during our stolen moments on the sidewalk, her father was actually a second cousin to the Bobeas, a connection that anchored them both to a strange, insular legacy far removed from our bustling neighborhood. They all hailed from a tiny, mist-shrouded village tucked high within the rugged, emerald folds of the Cordillera Oriental mountain range, perched precariously on the isolated outskirts of Higüey where the world felt ancient and untouched.

It was a place where time seemed to have stood still, and the local rumors—the kind that traveled in hushed, wary tones across the valley—suggested that the people of that mountain enclave had never bothered to look beyond their own high ridges for companionship or love. Instead, they had maintained a fierce, almost hauntingly closed society, refusing to mix with the vibrant, sun-kissed locals below; the entire village was whispered to be a tangled, complicated web of distant and close relatives who had spent generations quietly marrying one another, preserving a singular, pale bloodline within the shadow of the peaks as if the rest of the world simply didn’t exist.

The glorious, glowing exception

Yet, looking at Isabella, it was clear she was the glorious, glowing exception to that pale, mountainous rule. Her skin was a breathtaking masterpiece of light brown chocolate dipped in liquid honey, a radiant hue that looked as though it had been lovingly caressed by endless, shimmering hours under the fierce Caribbean sun until she practically vibrated with warmth. It was a complexion that told a much more vibrant, adventurous story than the insular, monochrome history of her father’s kin—a story of open horizons and the beautiful, inevitable merging of different worlds.

Watching the way the light caught the golden undertones of her face, I was fairly certain that her family tree, at least on her mother’s side, was comfortably and blessedly low on the practice of first cousins getting hitched and having babies; she was the living, breathing proof that the most exquisite beauty happens when the world is allowed to bleed together, resulting in a girl who was far too radiant to have ever been born from the stagnant shadows of a closed-off mountain village.

I adored my Isabella with a staggering, breathless intensity that bordered on the sacred, as if every beat of my heart had been recalibrated to drum out her name in a rhythmic, desperate worship. She was my sun, my north star, and the very air I breathed, but it was her hair that truly held me captive—a long, flowing river of dark-brown silk that seemed to catch the light and hold it hostage in its depths. It was so impossibly fine and smooth that it looked like delicate, shimmering strips of coal warmed by a slow-burning fire, glowing with a hidden warmth that I could feel even before I reached out to touch it.

Whenever I was brave enough to let my hand wander into those dark waves, I would feel the strands glide past my fingers like a soft, electric current, a gentle tide of silk that pulled me away from the mundane, dusty reality of the street and carried me toward a place I had never known existed—a world that was softer, more beautiful, and infinitely more alive simply because she was the center of it.

Adolescente vuelvo hoy…a descubrirte en mi canción…a renacer en silencio de la flor²

I could lose myself for an eternity within the fathomless depths of her eyes, which were a deep, liquid brown that reminded me of smoldering embers buried deep in the heart of a dying fire—dark, warm, and pulsing with a secret life. They were a beautiful, confusing paradox, brimming with a quiet, ancient mystery that I couldn’t yet name, yet glowing with an unmistakable, wide-eyed innocence that made the rest of the world feel cynical and gray by comparison. The way she looked at me was so devastatingly pure, so utterly perfect, that it felt like she possessed the supernatural ability to make time itself grind to a shivering halt, freezing the universe in a single, breathless moment of absolute clarity.

In those seconds, nothing else possessed the power to distract me; neither the blinding, white-hot glare of the Caribbean sun hanging heavy in the sky nor the thick, acrid clouds of smoke from the burnt bagasse drifting over from the nearby sugar mill could force me to break my gaze. The world could have been crumbling into the sea, but as long as I was anchored by the gravity of her stare, I was exactly where I was meant to be, blissfully oblivious to everything but the girl in front of me.

I was utterly enchanted, and I could see the same spell cast over her, both of us sinking deeper into a bright, infinite, and terrifyingly warm sea of gonadotropin-releasing hormones that dictated our every frantic pulse. It was a biological upheaval we didn’t fully understand but felt in every fiber of our beings; waves upon waves of follicle-stimulating hormones and luteinizing hormones crashed into our young bloodstreams with the sudden, overwhelming violence of a tropical storm. The very air between us became thick and electric, vibrating with the wild, unpredictable fluctuations of estrogen, progesterone, estradiol, and testosterone that turned a simple brush of the shoulders into a high-voltage connection.

We felt strange, almost freakish in our new intensity, and deliriously unnatural as our bodies transformed into something foreign and powerful right before our eyes. Yet, in that beautiful, chemical chaos, we were utterly invincible—frozen in a state of being forever young and eternally happy, caught in a physiological rapture that made the mundane world feel like it was miles away, leaving only the two of us to navigate the brilliant, crashing waves of our own awakening.

I lived in a state of total, blissful starvation, where the physical gnawing of hunger or the looming, suffocating pressure of unfinished homework felt like distant, irrelevant echoes from a life I had long since abandoned. Every responsibility and basic human need was stripped away until nothing remained but the crushing, beautiful gravity of her presence. The entire world had been whittled down to a singular, vibrant focal point: the curve of her smile that seemed to rewrite the laws of physics and the soft, intoxicating heat she radiated like a private sun whenever I sat close enough for our shadows to mingle.

There was no past to remember and no future to plan for; there was only the haunting, sweet scent of her hair and the breathless, electric taste of her lips—a sensation so profound it felt like swallowing stars. In the quiet, heavy stillness of our proximity, the universe itself simply ceased to exist, folding into the dark and leaving us alone in a brilliant, timeless void where she was the only thing that was real.

In the grand scheme of my life, the only currency that held any real value was the steady, rhythmic ticking of the seconds, minutes, and hours we spent perched together on that weathered, sun-baked sidewalk. It was our sanctuary, a humble stretch of concrete that felt more like a throne room where we reigned over our own secret kingdom of whispers and shared glances. I found myself obsessively savoring every fragile moment, memorizing the way her shoulder felt against mine and the exact cadence of her laughter, as if I could bottle the feeling to survive the cold, lonely hours ahead.

But beneath the joy, there was a sharp, persistent ache of dread—a shadow that lengthened as the sun dipped lower, marking the inevitable approach of the moment her father would come home. His arrival was the cruel signal that our time had expired, the cold hand of reality reaching out to snatch me away from her side and force me back into a world where she wasn’t within arm’s reach, leaving me to count the agonizing minutes until the sun rose and I could return to her once more.

Pero adolescente en algún lugar estas…En el canto de la lluvia te puedo respirar…con tus manos blandas hacia barcos de papel…hoy recuerdo a tu risa de [niña] como ayer³

School, of course, was still there—a persistent, demanding ghost that haunted the periphery of my day and tried its best to steal my focus away from the only person who mattered. By then, I had reached the eleventh grade, navigating the long, echoing hallways of my junior year, but my presence there was the result of a strange twist of fate from my early childhood. Years ago, my second-grade teacher, Miss Marina Creales, had looked down at my four-year-old self and decided I was far too small and fragile to survive the rough-and-tumble ecosystem of the older classes.

She chose to hold me back a year, a decision that was undoubtedly a stroke of divine protection, likely saving my scrawny frame from an endless cycle of schoolyard beatings and the harsh, bruised reality of being the youngest target. While I should have been overflowing with gratitude for her foresight, it felt like a heavy, bureaucratic curse as I sat at my desk, my heart aching for the final bell; her mercy had the unfortunate effect of tethering me to the classroom for an extra year, delaying my graduation and stretching out the agonizing wait for a future where Isabella and I could finally be free from the rigid schedules of childhood.

I wasn’t exactly a social pariah; I drifted through the vibrant, noisy halls of the eleventh grade surrounded by a small constellation of girls who made the school days bearable. There was Griselda, my absolute best friend and partner-in-crime, the kind of person who understood my jokes before I even finished the punchline, and then there was Dominga Jaqueline, who was so undeniably, breathtakingly pretty that she seemed to exist in her own soft-focus spotlight. I laughed with them, studied with them, and navigated the chaotic social currents of teenage life by their side, but despite their warmth and beauty, they were merely shadows passing through a room where the light was already claimed.

My heart was no longer a free agent; it belonged, in its entirety, to Isabella, anchored by a devotion so deep it felt ancestral. When the house fell silent and the world outside my window grew dark, I would lie awake for hours, staring at the ceiling and painting vivid, cinematic masterpieces of the life we were destined to build together. I would whisper her name into the shadows, mapping out the architecture of our future—calculating exactly how many children we would have, debating the imaginary floor plans of the house where we would grow old, and cementing the unshakable, naive conviction that we were the exception to every rule, destined to be together until the very end of time.

The concept of a world where I would not wake up and see her face was a foreign language I simply couldn’t speak, a dark and impossible reality that never once dared to cross the threshold of my mind. It was utterly unfathomable to imagine a day where I couldn’t reach out and find her there, where I couldn’t lace my trembling fingers through hers or feel the soft, breathless electricity of her lips against mine. The very idea of never again holding her close—of losing the chance to feel the frantic, rhythmic drum of her heart beating a desperate duet against my own chest—felt like trying to imagine the sun suddenly falling out of the sky. I was a devout scholar of her existence, memorizing the sharp, sweet sting of the cinnamon bubblegum she always favored and the melodic way her laughter would erupt at my most absurd, nonsensical jokes.

I lived for those quiet, sacred moments when the wind would catch her hair and I could gently brush a stray, silken strand away from her eyes, a gesture that felt more significant than any historical treaty. In the absolute, blinding certainty of my first love, I was convinced we were eternal; the concept of an ending was a ghost story told to people who didn’t love as fiercely as we did, and never in a million years did I believe that our universe could ever truly stop turning.

Los chistes a…absurdos…Adolescente tierno…contando las últimas monedas…que en el bolsillo le quedaron…y me dejabas el sabor…de un cigarrillo de la tarde…que moría lentamente con el sol⁴

When the end arrives…

When the end finally arrived, it wasn’t a slow, fading sunset or a gradual drifting apart; it was a violent, catastrophic collision that shattered my world with a suddenness that left me breathless and broken. In that single, soul-crushing moment, the most vibrant and beautiful part of my being simply ceased to exist, dying a quiet, agonizing death right there in the dirt. Everything that made my youth feel like a masterpiece—the unblemished purity of my heart, the wide-eyed innocence that believed in forever, and the radiant, golden light that seemed to follow her every move—was snuffed out in an instant, leaving behind a cold, hollow silence where the music of our love used to play.

The warmth that had sustained me and the effortless poetry of our shared glances vanished, replaced by a devastating apathy so profound that the very will to live felt like a heavy, impossible burden I was no longer interested in carrying. It was the definitive closing of a door I would spend the rest of my life trying to force back open, haunted by the crushing realization that never again, in all my remaining years, would I look into someone else’s eyes and see that same brilliant, unadulterated reflection of pure love—a light that only burns once and leaves nothing but ashes in its wake.

In the decades that followed that final, shattering collapse, I became a reluctant collector of emotional fragments, sifting through the wreckage of my heart to identify the jagged pieces that remained. I have wandered through the searing, temporary heat of lust and built sturdy, predictable foundations of trust; I have felt the sharp, poisonous sting of jealousy and the slow, corrosive burn of anger that eventually hardens into the heavy, immovable stone of bitterness. I’ve carried the quiet, persistent weight of regret like a leaden locket around my neck and felt the cold, hollow surrender of resignation when the fighting finally stopped and the silence took over.

I’ve drifted through the gray, featureless fog of apathy and the paralyzing haze of ambivalence, where nothing felt real enough to truly hurt or truly heal. I have known the steady, unglamorous rhythm of duty and the soft, cushioned edges of comfort and emotional safety—the kind of love that keeps you warm at night but never dares to set your soul on fire. I have even stared into the dark, suffocating abyss of hatred, learning that it is often just love’s distorted, agonizing reflection. In short, I have experienced every constituent color of the emotional spectrum, carefully cataloging all the various hues and bruised shades that love can take when it is broken down into its base elements, yet I have spent the rest of my life realizing that while I can hold each individual pigment in my hand, I can never quite find the light that once painted them all together into the masterpiece I lost.

But never again the rainbow.

From that moment on, I lived with the heavy, unshakeable burden of knowing the exact answer to the question that haunts every poet and songwriter: What is love? It was no longer a shimmering, untouchable mystery, but a broken machine I had learned to take apart and put back together. I could reach into the wreckage and pick out each individual color of its shattered rainbow, holding the fragments in my hands like polished stones to inspect them under the cold light of experience. I could call every emotion by its proper, clinical name and speak of it with a detached, weary authority, but the magic had been replaced by a somber, calculated reality.

Love had become mature—a polite, responsible version of itself that prioritized the practical over the profound. It transformed into a checklist of shared goals and stable credit scores, an exercise in compatibility and emotional maturity rather than the glorious, reckless surrender to the hormones that once flooded my veins. It was no longer a wild, uncontrollable storm that threatened to drown me, but a carefully managed climate, predictable and safe, where the thrill of the unknown had been traded for the quiet, hollow comfort of knowing exactly what to expect when the sun went down.

Love eventually settled into the mundane, rhythmic demands of a life lived in the daylight, becoming less about the electric pulse of a heartbeat and more about the steady, relentless necessity of making mortgage payments and ensuring the kids were dropped off at school before the first bell. It shifted into a series of calculated, pragmatic decisions, where the body moved with a weary, practiced efficiency, no longer a vessel for the wild, uncontrollable forces of nature that once dictated my every breath.

I found myself in a reality where my actions were guided by logic and long-term planning, a far cry from the days when I was a helpless passenger in a mind enslaved by the sudden, violent commands of my own biology—when my brain would trigger my pituitary gland to flood my bloodstream with GnRH, turning the world into a vibrating, technicolor dream. The raw, terrifying alchemy of youth had been refined into a stable, manageable domesticity, and as the years stretched on, I came to the quiet, heartbreaking suspicion that my story wasn’t unique. I suspect it has been this way for everyone else, too—a silent, universal transition where we all eventually trade our wings for a sturdy pair of shoes, walking the sensible paths we’ve built while forever mourning the time we were capable of flight.

Pero adolescente en algún lugar estas…en el canto de la lluvia te puedo respirar…con tus manos blandas hacia barcos de papel…hoy recuerdo a tu risa de [niña] como ayer

Yet, despite the cold logic and the grey, sensible world I now inhabit, I have never truly stopped chasing that first, intoxicating high. I find myself falling in love time and again, a desperate ghost-hunter stalking the halls of my own heart, always convinced with a manic, delusional certainty that this time, finally, the magic will return in its full, devastating glory.

I go looking for her in every new face, searching for a phantom reflection of my Isabella, praying that the world will once again narrow down to a single, breathless point of origin where the clocks stop and the air catches fire. I crave that total, divine obliteration where nothing exists beyond the familiar, haunting scent of her hair and the electric, star-dusted taste of her lips—a love so all-consuming and absolute that even the vast, indifferent universe would back away in awe, not even daring to exist in the presence of a fire that bright.

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[1][2][3][4]: Adeslecente Eterno, by Tormenta. Copyright © 1971 SME (on behalf of RCA Records Label); UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA — UBEM, UMPG Publishing, LatinAutor — UMPG, Rumblefish (Publishing), ASCAP, LatinAutor, and 10 Music Rights Societies. No infringement intended.