Fifteen and Somebody Tells You They Love You (A Five Minute Post)

Lisa-Jo challenged me to write five years ago into words in just five minutes!

Taylor Swift is right about being fifteen. I was anxiously cheerful, loudly inquisitive, poking and prodding around my heart to figure out what it meant to be a teenager, to love learning, to be more interested in understanding the meaning of "That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet" in our Romeo and Juliet skits than be fascinated by what the Gap was selling.

I so wanted to be in love that I wove stories from chance encounters, from the scruffy-haired boy and magic marker sneakers. And it was the year of "Hilary, you look gorgeous" for the first time and the whirlwind hormones whistling through my heart.

And it was the year of discovering the special heart I have for those stories - Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park and Sense & Sensibility told me their trials and troubles and I lay on my bed that winter break so immersed that when my mother asked me if I wanted a cup of tea, I replied:

Mom, I'm in eighteenth century England now! I don't have time for tea! I can't answer that question!

And oh how much I loved literature and my backpack heavy with good meaty words and learning to put them together, cup them up to my ear like the conch shell and listen for the sounds of the waves.

Fifteen and those books were God whispering, I love you. That Somebody who tells you they love you, and I heard it first in those pages, in the breathtaking genuine joy that tumbled out of me like a wriggling puppy, legs splayed and uncontainable.

Fifteen and I had no words for the joy, no words for the marrying of trouble thoughts and contented thoughts. But I bounded through the stories and through the school and through the harsh New England snow filled with it and all that wilderness of teenage life, that was me.

I see a picture and think, yes, yes. I'm still growing and sometimes my head still spins and I want to act out Romeo and Juliet and I want to live in the big stories. {And that squirming wriggly fidgety puppy of life and joy still bounds out of me some days - today is one of them.}

Love,
Hilary