Under the Sun

This one is about my first love, the adolescent one, when I genuinely didn’t know whether what I felt was going anywhere or whether I was just standing somewhere with hope.

The structural twist, revealing halfway through that she’d also been waiting, this whole time, wasn’t something I planned as a twist. That’s simply how it actually happened, that particular, disorienting discovery that someone else had been standing in the same uncertainty the whole time, each of us invisible to the other’s hope until we finally looked up.

I kept the setting fixed on purpose, under the sun, along the road, the same still, daytime scene for both the waiting and the meeting. First love, to me, didn’t feel like weather. It felt like plain daylight that I somehow failed to read correctly until I finally did.

“And love waited for us, oh!” is the closest I get anywhere in this catalogue to being simply, uncomplicatedly happy. I let myself have that, once, without irony.