This story, by Tara Boyce, was the winner of our Show Off Writing Contest: Love Story Edition earlier this month. Tara is a student at BYU, where she studies literature and writing. You can read more of her writing on her blog. I'm quite proud to post her story, “On Behalf of Love,” here on The Write Practice. Enjoy!

Photo by By Nicki Varkevisser

I fell in love for the first time in eighth grade for a blond-haired blue-eyed boy who was seven months younger than me. We had social studies, P.E., and science together.

I remember now those last few months of the school year. The second the last period bell rang and Mark and I had to say goodbye to each other after P.E. class, I fell into a moody depression, in which I would return home to my room, turn on my CD player and listen to Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby” over and over, lying on my bed, staring at my purple ceiling, sometimes tearing up with heart-yearning. This happened most evenings, until I woke up way too early the next morning, put on my stereo again, and took thirty minutes to bathe (I always bathed because it was much more romantic). I would then blow dry and curl my hair, and apply the little makeup I was allowed to wear.

I remember the last day of my eighth grade year. It was bright, it was June, and the sun had this daring power over me. Mark had just signed my yearbook, “Your future’s so bright, I’ve gotta wear shades,” which made me laugh and love him even more as we walked together to his bus. This would be the last time I would see him for a long time, and I felt nauseous, as if someone opposed to my loving Mark had tightened a fist around my stomach. Still, I laughed all the way to his bus because in moments like these, all you want to see is the sun shining in the middle of the open sky, the bus still so many feet away, and the way you both shine together in the sun, listening to each other’s pauses.

We took our time and let the others get on the bus before him until we could stall not longer. As he walked up the steps onto the bus, my heart bounced wildly—hearts really do bounce and jump and wobble—and I cried out, “Wait! I have to tell you something.” He stopped and looked at me and I ran up the steps to him. “I have to tell you something,” I said, although I didn’t know what it was I had to say.

“A secret,” I said. He smiled and leaned in and I, I laughed that nervous, Is this real? laugh I always laugh when something enormous is about to happen. I cupped my hand over my mouth and leaned into his ear and kissed his cheek. Then I ran away.

My legs and my lungs cheered as I ran because I had finally shown Mark Speck that even though I was seven months older than him, even though I was Mormon and he was Catholic, even though I was going away to high school and he was staying behind, I still, I still, loved him and oh, how it felt to prove it.

♦

I am still learning more about love as I grow older—how it changes shape and color the older it gets. Though I still take baths because warm soap water will always be romantic, kisses on the cheek are no longer a secret, and I no longer feel the need to run from them—I married Ryan because I no longer wanted to. I also no longer feel like puking when Ryan is away. Instead, I want him to come back and I believe he will and I believe that is worth celebrating.

And yet sometimes I wonder what would happen to my understanding of love if he never came back. Or if we both, someday, wanted to leave, like my grandparents or my friends’ parents or my own parents. I am tempted—with all the statistics in the world to back me up—to say love fades in and out like a rainbow trout in between shadow and sunwater. We keep reaching at it because—well, because it’s just so mysteriously beautiful. If only we could hold it and keep it and that brilliant wet sheen could last forever.

Perhaps I disgrace love by suggesting this: that love could ever fade. Perhaps it is we who fade, and our mortal inability to experience anything without growing tired of it makes us most unworthy of love. Perhaps love is not the fish in this metaphor. We are. Are we not transformed as if through water and light when we experience such a thing as love?

♦

I’m remembering a year ago, when everyone from the congregation was invited to share at the pulpit. A woman walked up to the microphone and faced us. She said she had had a hard month, but she just had to come up, even if it meant leaving her three little red heads wrestling in the bench. She told us she loved her husband, who was sitting near the pulpit behind her, and that she didn’t know how he did all he did, but she loved him for it.

I saw the way her husband looked at her, as shy and quiet as he is. He had to look up because he was sitting and she was standing. I saw the way his face flushed the color of his hair—he had given all her children their red hair—not with embarrassment, but with what looked like a sort of desperation because how could he ever do any of it without her?

As she finished, her husband stood up too soon, before she finished saying amen. He hugged her there, beside the pulpit. He hugged her for a long time, in front of all of us, and those of us who were watching, we hushed ourselves and reverenced ourselves because we knew we were not just witnessing, but partaking something of the sacred.

♦

More than the big extraordinary moments—the first kiss on the cheek, the first date, and someday, the first child—I see love in those small moments that happen not just once but again and again and again, whether or not anyone is looking at us.

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This month we celebrated Valentine’s Day. Rumor has it we celebrate this day because of an old Saint who, they say, secretly performed marriages for young soldiers unable to marry—marriage, that evil distraction, was outlawed for those poor Roman soldiers. They say Valentine was sent to prison for his secret ceremonies, and that he sent the first “valentine” to the daughter of his jailer who would visit him in his cell. “From your Valentine,” he wrote her, just before they sentenced him to death.

To me the most romantic part is that the girl visited him. Over and over.

The truth is we don’t know if Saint Valentine existed, what he did, or why we celebrate him with so many flowers and balloons and chocolates. Still, every year I find myself choosing to believe the rumors, not because I want to get presents or because I love any reason to celebrate (which I do), but because I believe in celebrating what we are each made from and what I believe we are each made for.

I think again of the girl who visited Valentine, perhaps early in the morning when he was feeling most alone. Perhaps he saw her not through rose-tinted glasses, but through iron bars. I imagine her kneeling across the dusty, stone floor, whispering that no matter what happened to him God knew him, she knew him, and he was made to be remembered. And I am thinking now, aren’t we all?

I wonder if love taught Valentine and the jailer’s daughter that purpose can be glimpsed even in the darkest of places. I wonder if they glimpsed this in each other as they looked through those bars. And I wonder now if love exists entirely separate from us. If so, how insignificant and powerful we are.

♦

The other night I dreamt of rain, which fell all over the wooden back porch of the first home I remember living in. There were many of us there and we all wore my favorite colors—yellows, reds, oranges.

There were bright blue buckets all over the porch, all around us, filling up with rain. And when the buckets started to overflow, to burst over, we all laughed. Then, we got on our backs.

We opened our mouths to the sky. We lay there on our backs for a long time, drinking and drinking, filling until we were full and then full again.

When I awoke from the dream, I leaned over in the dark and reached for my notebook (I didn’t want to wake Ryan). I wrote down what I could remember of that small moment of candescence, of what it felt like to lie there, face-up and open.

I rolled over and hugged Ryan, then rolled back onto my back. I stared at the black ceiling for a few minutes, thinking.

Not why, not when, but how: to ever-fill, to ever be filled, to ever drink in, to ever quench?