I grew up spinning my stories.
I grew up knitting together images of the places and the faces I would meet, I imagined things that would make me smile, imagine the people that would make me laugh even when I wasn't supposed to, I imagined what It would be like to have a broken heart, and what it would be like to heal one.
You know, I guess it's hard for a writer to be in a relationship, because my mind tells me the words that describe what I want from him.
I want the eleven in the morning feeling, where his fingers are brushing up my arms, he is trying not to wake me, and he doesn't think that I can hear him as he tells me that I'm beautiful.
Do you know that feeling, That cross between romance and peace, and just a little bit of utter desperation because the idea of him slipping through my fingers is just bordering on terrifying.
So from the time I had gotten above the first age divisible by five, I knew what my love looked like.
And my love,
Would have kind eyes.
Love would like to smile,
And he would have a way of doing it that would tell me exactly what I needed to hear without any of my precious words.
Love would be able to wrap his arms around me, love would be touchy, love would take me to his secret place and change it to ours, and love would kiss me because he likes the feeling of his lips against mine.
My love would have came from the same place as laughing, because the burst that wells up in my stomach would almost become painful when it eats away at any sadness in my skin and fills me with the warmth of him.

My love would be perfect.
At least to me.

In the fourth grade, I was moved schools to be taken out of the hard place that consisted of gifted student and bad teacher.
I learned new hallways, waited in line, stood on top of the hopscotch where I tried to make friends.
If you asked me then,
I wouldn't have thought much about the boy who tried to replace the Sam on his name tag with Samuel.
Even though his handwriting was god-awful, he added the letters U-E-L to the end of the neatly printed S-A-M on his pencil box.
I would have thought he was annoying.
After three full years I finally reached back to my friends from fifth grade, being at a different school for all this time had made it kind of hard to talk.
And I learned something.
That friends must have an expiration date,
Maybe tattooed on the sharpened edges of their minds,
Something had obviously gone bad when they sent me a joke about suicide.
All except for him.

Maybe it wasn't such a surprise that he became my friend all over again,
Maybe it wasn't surprise that,
After all those coincidences,
That repeated,
Us ending up at the same school all this time after,
That me and him became us.
I guess I didn't think much about the little boy who called himself Samuel, but then quite a bit about the boy who was as kind as I imagined love to be.
My Sam.

Sam likes to kiss the crook where my neck becomes my shoulder, He likes to wrap his arms around my around my waist, ignore all the curves that I have in the wrong places.
And he tells me he loves me.
Maybe that's better than being told I'm beautiful,
There are plenty of beautiful women in the world,
I would rather be loved by him than be beautiful,
By the person who makes me laugh even when I'm not supposed to laugh,
Even when I don't want to.
The person who wipes my tears away,
And makes me smile anyway.
Sam.
My Sam.