I’ll grow old with you.
But I’ll never grow up.
I promise you that I’ll still put mini-marshmallows in my hot chocolate, that I’ll wear my hair in pigtail braids, that I’ll wear bright colors and not care what anyone thinks. I’ll still get giddy when I hear the mowgli song. I’ll still splash you when we’re in the ocean. I’ll still want to blow bubbles and draw with chalk and get in water balloon fights.
Sure, I’ll be responsible and mature. I’ll pay the bills and remember to file taxes and make insurance claims and do the household work every day. I’ll cook meals and do my laundry and clean my room and conserve water and save my money. I’ll carry intelligent conversations, I’ll make executive decisions, and I’ll wear my fancy dresses and heels and go out for a night on the town.
But you better believe that I’ll doodle on the envelopes of those bills and binge-watch cartoons after a day of adult-talking and dance around the kitchen and smear batter on your nose and take you home after a night of drinks and throw pillows at your head.
I’ll grow old with you; I’d love to.
But I won’t grow up.
No matter what happens, I promise to always be silly, to always make you laugh, to always embrace that little-kid part of me that keeps us both young.
I promise to always love you with that childish sort of abandon, the kind of love that is so pure, no matter what obstacles come our way.
And I promise I’ll always find ways to have youthful moments, to play childhood games, to do kid things that aren’t always socially acceptable, but who cares?The truth is, this life is too short to always be prim and proper, to walk a line, to follow the rules of how an adult is supposed to behave.
No, I won’t embarrass you. No, I won’t act like a fool when I need to be dignified. And no, I’m not immature. I just love to celebrate being young and all the simple things that makes us happy.
Because
Me: madness
You: maturity
Perfect couple 😘❤️
All the times I waited for you, sitting on a bench in a park, looking at the pigeons or sitting alone in a café, looking outside the window, watching the passersby laughing or frowning as if looking at the flow of a river. All the times I waited for a smile, a sign to break the silence or a letter of yours letting me know you do care.
All the times I tried to decode your silence as if it were the greatest mystery of the universe. All the times I waited for you inside the dark room of a theater, half asleep in my chair waiting for you.
And then I got up, the bench remained empty behind me. There was a bit of cold coffee on the bottom of a cup. The wind softly blew the curtains of an empty café. And I walked around, with the fresh memory of a theater play I watched that just made my torment more vivid. I walked the empty streets of my hometown, not knowing where home is anymore because it’s been two years now since I live in a bubble.
I arrive home and I sit in the kitchen, I am still waiting for my hunger to stop, I look at the birds I painted last night and I invoke all the gods of structure to come back and put structure into my thoughts cause I am drifting somewhere far away from you and far away from myself. I will wait here in the kitchen, hoping for my hunger for you to stop, while deep frying in oil color a bird of paradise.
Another day passes and I am still bathing in silence as if swimming in the bottom of the ocean. I think about all the women that waited for their men to come back, lovers left the journey. Some dos come back and some never did. That's life. You didn't leave on a ship or a fight in desert, you just left to battle yourself. Ourselves against ourselves.
You still didn’t come back and the heart is a delicate mechanism, I think about those anatomical diagrams, red coming in and blue coming out. Blue because the blood coming out carries oxygen and we all know life is about breathing. I look at an X-ray of my heart today and it is all blurred, I see all kinds of birds and fish dancing around. I must have gone mad with all this waiting. Cause madness is an easy way to escape pain. But I am warrior myself, I lead the same private wars everyone else is leading. Ourselves against ourselves, in an heroic quest to fight loneliness and distance. I will not go mad, I will just go swimming every now and then on the bottom of the ocean, among colorful jellyfish and dancing corals. And those seahorses I like so much. I believe madness is just an immense sadness we do not understand.
I, I am still waiting for you to come back because I am a hopeless romantic, although being romantic is not a disease. But with time, my waiting changed in tone and color, it became more abstract. I started learning how to live with it. Despair changed to hope and as time passes, it will start changing into something similar to a religious feeling. ‘Cause my religion is passion and my expectations sky high. There is much love inside my heart and I do not want to kill it. Love is a pure, uplifting feeling, that has nothing to do with possession. This is why people who are capable of much love start becoming spiritual at some point in their life.
I don’t go that often to the cafés alone, I laugh and frown like everybody else. But somewhere inside that delicate mechanism that is this heart of mine, there will always be a place that is only yours.
I still don’t know if you will ever come back or not, but what I do know is that this waiting is worthy, cause when I cease the war against myself for a second and I stop to look around, as if looking at the other spectators during the break of a theater play, let’s say for instance it's like waiting for soulmate. I see myself in the mirror with a bigger heart now. It must be filled with red birds and blue fish of hope and longing. And love of course.
