The Last Sunbeams of Childhood

A love letter to the slightly confused, marred by the closing chapter of childhood, yet hope-filled kids who locked eyes and never had it in them to let go. The kids who couldn’t quite wrap their heads around what good and healthy looked like, yet were determined to dig their way to gold using a toothpick and grit. The kids that felt scared of rejection, scared of change, scared of feeling the fullness of the rugged coastline in a single teardrop on a cold night too afraid to speak for dread of it ending. The kids who wanted nothing more than to flee but with clipped wings and a fear of the sky, who learnt that roots, deep into the uneven surface of the red soil, would hold them more than the stars ever could.

This is a love letter to the lanky, scruffy, full-headed young man I fell ludicrously in love with after being fed to the sharks of first loves and heartbreak. The kid who seemed so much taller than I in every aspect. So much wiser, smarter, older, but who only knew as much, our palettes the same comprehension but with different hues. We traded swatches and unlocked new landscapes together. You were an alien for so long, an enigma, a closed book I so desperately wanted to pry open, to know your darkest secrets so I could heal you with shaky hands and a voice that wavered at any slight discomfort. I was incapable of it, but you held me, whilst I tried to squirm from your grip; you held me with the same heart I saw envelope the acreage we were forged from.

This is a love letter to the young girl who wanted the world and instead found the universe in a boy no more than 10 minutes down the road. The girl who thought that such a thing would be impossible, who searched overseas for something as sweet and instead found honey on the doorstep of her entire existence. The girl who let the last sunbeams of childhood wash over her, reach into her, in the lower story of a friend’s house, high on something greater than the chemical seeping through her stomach lining to her bloodstream. It’s a love letter to her, because if anything, she’s always been bold, but you could’ve effortlessly knocked the air out of her, and she could’ve chosen not to resurface. But she did, and fuck me sideways, am I glad she did.

This is a love letter to the couple we are now. Husband and wife. Best friends. Partners. Lovers. Still, and forever childlike but far from the kids we were years ago. In some respects we’ve cut the fat, and in many we are now rounder, with the joy of shared meals and chocolate biscuits with tea, plump and warm from the companionship of life. One hand on the steering wheel, the other laced in mine, laughing at the idiocy of your humour and my ability to mimic and throw it back effortlessly, a vocabulary I have come to learn from being in your orbit. Faces no longer as doughy and wide-eyed, having endured the trials of becoming ourselves whilst becoming us. Some days we are violently stretched into forms only crushing tides and forceful winds could manifest, but we anchor, restless and aching, until the light eventually breaks.

This is a love letter to keep our hearts open, our hands always within reach, our language forever spoken and fluid so no matter how wide the distance between us stretches, I can hear you. Through us we will start traditions and end those that do not capture the essence of our wonder. We will crash, wipe out, and continue to begin again, hopefully with the same adoring eyes, the same eternal desire to live on the edge of something marvellous and terrifying, and delicately ours. This is a love letter to the versions of us we are to become. The versions we will grow into, grow to love and grow out of. Our lives forever folding into each other with more intricacy each year. An origami of our greatest work that will eventually fold no more.

Happy six years, Rocca. In case you couldn’t tell, I love you.