At eighteen years old, I am no stranger to love. I felt it before I knew what it was, for I loved my mother before I knew her name was Erica and not Mommy. I felt it for my father even when I was so angry with him that I wished I could will my love for him away. I felt it for my sister in a way that could only exist between two people who had grown up in the exact same circumstances.
Romantic love manifests as a man in my mind. We meet at a masquerade ball and he has yet to remove his mask. He is a dashing stranger dressed in black with a white rose pinned to his lapel. Most of the time, he has dark hair effortlessly styled with a natural curve and brown eyes full of mystery and adventure. He is taller than me, which admittedly isn’t very difficult to manage. We dance, and he pulls me close. Closer than any of my lovers ever have, and he whispers in my ear, “Come find me.”
I lost my virginity when I was fourteen years old. I was a freshman in high school. I was at my then boyfriend James Miller’s house. We climbed the stairs to his bedroom and in typical teenage fashion began to make out the minute the door was closed. We found our way to his bed. He was lying on his blue sheets, the blanket tangled amidst our ankles. My lips were pressed against his. The bed was surrounded by our clothes and the room was flooded with natural light; the shades were open. My eyes found his, and in a completely silent agreement, we had sex. It was painless, but hardly romantic, and yet in that moment it was utter perfection.
I was not in love with James Miller. There were moments, though, when I thought I loved him. We would often sit in his living room playing with his baby sister—she really was the cutest baby I had ever seen. A colorful hair tie held a bit of her thin black hair out of her face. I would watch the way James sat with her between his legs, his arms stretching to grab whatever toy she wanted, or attempting to cleanly feed her a snack. I felt the words I love you bubble in my throat often in moments like those. It was a physical feeling, starting in the bottom of my stomach, journeying up into my chest, climbing into my throat and caressing my tongue. I wanted to tell him, to speak the words out loud and have them be true. So I did. I spoke them aloud and he spoke them back. But they were not true.
Everything spiralled out of control a few weeks after we had sex. He told his friends (the immature idiots) who began a series of pranks. It started with a letter to my lawyer father explaining that they were suing me for “fucking too loud.” He found this letter in the mailbox and gave it to me after school. His hands were shaking almost as much as his voice when he stressed how my clean reputation was at stake, and that I should find some way to get back on their good side. I was mortified that he had read the letter, so I looked at my shoes and simply nodded and ran to my room. He kept the letter, and we never spoke of it again. But the harassment from James’s friends continued; they stalked me at school. My school days were littered with sly lines full of innuendo that slid right under the teachers’ noses.
“Was that test hard enough for you, Sami?”
I spent most of class time on guard for the next sly hint to drop, but James’s reaction to his friends hurt worse than what they were doing. If I brought it up, he would change the subject. Sometimes he would just pretend not to hear me.
The final prank was the worst. I opened the door to find an empty video game box for Call of Duty and a noose left on my doorstep, which I found accompanied by a sticky note reading: For Sami. Use immediately. To me, the message was clear. End the game, and end your life.
I went home sick from school one day, and with my head in the toilet vomiting, I received a text from James:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I am single
And so are you.
As soon as I could, I replied, “Are you freaking kidding me?”
He was not kidding. After about three hours of texting, I was able to deduce that James’s friends wrote the poem, but he sent it, and he meant it. Clearly, I was not in love with James Miller. He was not the man hiding behind the masquerade mask in my mind.
The next man to have my heart in his hands was Isaiah. At the beginning of junior year I spent an afternoon with him. We walked around our school campus, talking about anything that crossed our minds. I watched the sun catch his dark brown hair, effortlessly tousled into waves styled with the natural ease of someone who had just hopped out of bed. He read me a few lines of his poetry while wringing his hands and playing with his hair. Eventually, we found our way into the dining hall. I filled a bowl with cereal and milk. Isaiah didn’t eat, he fidgeted with his hands and his seating position instead.
We sat together at a round table. I ate my cereal and Isaiah nervously talked too much. After draining the milk from my bowl, I got up to clear my plate. When I came back to the table, Isaiah blurted out, “I think you’re cute, I just wanted to tell you that, yeah and I like you a lot.”
Slightly dumbfounded, I responded, “Thank you! I really like you too, but now isn’t a really good time for me.” (It wasn’t.) “But I definitely will let you know when I’m more available.”
By the time I was less busy with sports and school, Isaiah had moved on. Not that I blame him—I still consider asking him to wait for me one of the more rude things I’ve ever done. Who was I to ask him to put his happiness on hold? But at the end of the year our timelines aligned. We finally got to spend some time together. We never “defined the relationship.” He was a senior in high school, and it was the last few months of the school year—not the most convenient time to start a relationship.
Coincidentally, my sister had also begun a relationship with one of Isaiah’s close friends, Michael. The four of us had hilarious nights. I would pick up Isaiah and take him to my house to meet with Michael. We would commit heinous acts of teenage rebellion before splitting up to spend some some time with our significant others alone. Isaiah and I would cuddle, watch TV, have sex…the normal teenage things to do when the parents were out of the house. I would eventually drive him home, or he would take an Uber, and I would be left alone in my bed. I felt empty inside whenever he left, hollow and cold. No matter how many blankets I had covering me, I couldn’t get warm.
My feelings for Isaiah were very strong. I acted like his girlfriend, but Isaiah suffered from a mental disorder, and sometimes his mind was beyond my reach. There were days when I would text him expecting him to be my normal goofy boy, and instead find that he was in the music building crying at the piano. I would always rush to console him, holding his hand and whispering sweet nothings to him until he pulled himself together enough to go back to class. After a day like that, I would make sure to check in and call him at night. However, when I needed someone to confide in or talk to, he was never there. Even something as simple as talking about a bad day ended up with our talking about his life and problems. When I leaned on him as one would do on one’s boyfriend, I would fall.
I called him one day to talk about that discrepancy. I was full of passion. I—like many other women have done— thought I could “fix” him with only the power of my words. The phone line trilled through the speakers of my car, until finally I heard “Hello?” in his smooth tenor voice.
“Isaiah, just listen, I need to say some stuff. I feel like I’m always there for you. When you’re sad, I call you. If you’ve had a bad day, I’m always here. If you need a hug, no matter who is around, I always find you. If you need to talk I always make time. Whether you know it or not I’ve been acting as your girlfriend for about a month now. But you’re not here for me in the same way. Listen, it’s fine if you don’t want to be in a relationship, but I can’t let myself do this and develop these feelings for you if you’re not going to have my back. I just need to know.”
I expected him to drop everything and profess his love for me right then and there. After that monologue, how couldn’t he? What I didn’t expect was this: “Okay, then I think we should stop.”
“Stop? What do you mean, stop?”
“Stop everything. We have to end whatever is going on here.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. Isaiah come on…”
“I’m sorry, maybe another time. But you’re right, this isn’t fair, and I can’t change that. So we have to stop.”
I was in shock. I pulled into a parking lot and just cried. It was the first time I had ever shed a tear over a man—he was the first man to shatter my heart.
We ended up being friends. I still see him over school breaks occasionally and on social media. But it has never been the way it was, and I have never been the same either. Isaiah, also, was not the man behind the masquerade mask.
I was a naive girl. I still am naive. I am too quick to trust. For as long as I can remember I have dreamed of finding my masquerade man. Someone to sweep me off into a romantic sunset dinner. Someone to tell all of my secrets to. Someone to love. But love at eighteen is rooted in its temporary nature. Time constrains the relationships like a vice and the tighter it holds the harder it is to let go. Love at eighteen is as fake as a masquerade mask, beautiful but only good for hiding what’s underneath.