So How Much Did You Miss Me...?

I've been thinking about love a lot lately and couldn't exactly tell you why.

When I was seventeen, I fell head over heels in love with a boy named Gabriel on a visit to Cuba. He turned my world upside down in ways no one had the capacity to do. Wise beyond his years, spontaneous, honest, cultured, absolutely mad in ways few people can be without scratching the crazy surface.

Meeting him marked a precedent for the man I'd ultimately want to end up with if he just so happens to roam this earth. A sense of urgency so thick cuts the air when you're madly in love with a person whom you share a long distance relationship with. Days are measured in years and nights consumed with a hunger one can only reserve for their last meal on earth. Our country became our own personal playground, whatever it was we were doing intensifying with every trip, with every letter, with every phone call.

"That which with fury's picked up, with fury is dropped," my mom used to tell me. I'd reply fury had nothing to do with it and continued living in a dream world where Gabriel and I would one day roam together.

When the inevitable topic of marriage came up two years later, a split second of insanity told me it was the only route. Of course days later I came to my senses and despite a heart so heavy I felt it at my feet, we ended things. Each time I return to Cuba I'm engulfed by those days, when innocence claimed that love truly does conquer all, and everything else can be resolved through the strength of said feeling. Sometimes we speak and reminisce on times only Alzheimer's and death can take from us, the friendship flower we cultivated out of two broken hearts still growing strong twelve years later.

This time I returned to my country and none of the melancholy of times gone by accompanied me. If I learned anything from the past is that it exists to appreciate the future. If I learned anything from mistakes is that they're made to not be repeated. If I learned anything from anything is that I still have a lot to learn. And if I learned anything about love is that it's made of actions and not words, for actions build things (tangible or otherwise). And words are just that: words.

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I leave you guys with a few pictures of my trip to Cuba for my cousin Mel's "quinces." There's a simplicity to life there I sometimes miss. And a complexity to the one I lead here I'm grateful for and would never give up.

Love,

Annah