Love and Other Things

John laughs beside me. I love his laugh. I watch him calm down, the steady rise and fall of his chest and the steadying of his breaths. He is beautiful.

“So, let’s say I looked into your future, say… ten years from now. What do you see yourself doing?” I ask him, a grin on my face.

“Well,” John says slowly. He pauses for a moment as he thinks over his answer. “I hope the boys and I’ll still be doing the same thing, just making and playing our music,” John replies, smiling from ear to ear.

“What’s next, though? Don’t you have any plans aside from music?” I’m not going to lie, I’m a little saddened by the fact that John doesn’t have a thought about a wife, or even a girlfriend, in his future. “What about, you know, love?” I add on quietly. John just laughs, and I don’t know why, but I feel my heart twist and turn and wring around itself. It hurts.

“Love! I can’t imagine myself with a little lady in the future,” John takes it as a joke. “What do you see in your future? Ten years from now and shit?” I’m embarrassed because of the answer I have in mind.

“I want to be in love,” I mumble quietly, hoping John won’t hear me. I look up, and John’s not smiling.

“Seriously? You really want to be in love, Nina?” He raises a questioning eyebrow, and I want to shrink away.

“Yeah,” is my small response.

“What’s so great about it?” John scoffs, “Love’s overrated, all you do is get hurt. It’s all about sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. Minus the drugs part. I mean, unless it’s your thing.” He adds a grin for good measure, but I don’t see the humor.

“Is that really what you think?” I ask, stunned by John’s cynical views about love.

"Yep," John says, then shrugs.

"Is that said from experience?" I feel like I'm pushing it too far. When John starts to turn pink around the ears and cheeks, I know for sure that I've stepped over the line.

"God damn it, Nina! What is it with you and your stupid infatuation with love? It's not real, it's a fairy tale every kid wants to believe in." I wanted to cry, wanted to believe John was lying and that he was just saying this, hurting me, in a fit of rage. But what if it was something beyond that?

"You don't know what it's like, Nina," he says darkly, and for a moment, I’m afraid of the boy I've known throughout my entire childhood. "You don't know what it's like to fall so madly in love for someone that you're pretty much blind to everything else that's around you, you don't know what it's like to want to give someone your everything, to want to die for them, to want to be with them every waking moment you have," By now, my hopes and dreams of love are shattered, fractured by John's distorted reality.

"But I do know, John," I say petulantly.

"No you don't, Nina, you're just a kid," John's voice is now weak. Lifeless. “You don’t want to be in love.” He walks away, and just like that, my seventeen year old heart is broken by a twenty three ear old I will never be able to have.



Three days have never felt so long. Maybe it’s because they were spent without John, maybe it’s because I spent all three of those days locked up in my room, I really don’t know. But three days have never felt so long. I can’t handle it. I miss John, but I can’t stop repeating what he said to me. You don’t want to be in love. But I do, John, I do. When I was twelve, my parents filed a divorce. When I was fifteen, my eighteen year old sister ran off to Las Vegas with her boyfriend to get married. My mom told her that it would be a waste of time, and that her boyfriend would get her pregnant, leave, and break her heart. But he never did. They got married at eighteen in Las Vegas, young and in love. They moved back to Tempe a few days after. They’re twenty years old now, and just as in love as they were two years ago. He’s going to law school in New York while my sister’s going to Columbia. She wants to have a baby when they’re twenty four. He couldn’t be more excited.

That’s why I want to be in love. I’ve gone so long without, and every time I see a couple, it just makes me want love even more. I’m sick of the way I’m obsessed with it. I almost believe that John is right, but I have to keep believing in it. I want it so badly.



A week has passed, and I still haven’t talked to John. I miss him more than I have ever missed anyone. I have no calls or texts from him, which makes me feel even more upset than I already am. I go to the grocery store because I have nothing to do and we’re out of eggs, and I see John across the aisle. He’s looking at a carton of milk that’s bright blue and has a sun with a smiley face on it and a cow that says, “100% ORGANIC!” in a speech bubble. I don’t know why companies personify things. I’m mulling things over when I find John standing right in front of me, holding that carton of milk.

“We need to talk,” he says, and I merely nod in response. We pay for our things and walk through the sliding doors, about five feet of awkwardness between us. We ditch our cars in the grocery store parking lot, trading them in for a walk instead of a drive.

“I need to know what happened the other day,” John says, stopping.

“I wanted to fall in love. You found it stupid.” Is my stiff response, and John’s face falls.

“Nina, I—I didn’t mean it like that,” he replies.

“John, you just don’t understand,” I’m exasperated already and it hasn’t even been five minutes.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to understand!” It hasn’t even been five minutes and we’re already yelling at each other. The overcast sky thunders, and light rain starts to come down. I know that within minutes, it’ll be pouring.

“Love, John! You don’t understand that I want love, above all things, I want love! I’m sorry you can’t believe that, but I want it so badly, since my sister married her boyfriend. Since my mom read me bedtime stories that always have a happy ending. Since the movies had those boy-meets-girl-and-they-fall-in-love-the-end plots! Love has been what I’ve been looking for!”

“Fuck, Nina! You don’t understand anything, do you? You don’t want to fall in love, take it from me. Freshman year of high school, I met Emily. It was perfect, really. I had great friends, and a beautiful girl and I hit it off on the first week of school. I fell in love with her by the end of the month. She cheated on me with a senior. Junior year, Loren moved into Tempe. She was perfect. She loved music just as much as I did, she was smart, she was funny, she could be more perverted than any guy when she wanted to be, she kicked ass at video games, she was every guy’s dream. Then, some drunk driver crashes into her the night of senior prom. I’ve never lived that night down, never forgiven myself. Then, when we were touring with We the Kings, VersaEmerge, The Cab, and There for Tomorrow on The Secret Valentine Tour, I met Valencia. She was a foreign exchange student from Spain, and I fell in love with her when I saw her. Call me cliché, but we had a real fucking connection. Then I find out, three months later, that she has a boyfriend back in Spain. That’s barely scratching the surface of how many times love has screwed with my heart and me.

“You don’t want to be in love, Nina, it hurts too much. I think if I add all the times I spent angry at myself for ever getting mixed up with a girl, or writing a song about someone I was still hung up over, I would have spent months trying to mend my broken heart. I don’t have a heart anymore, Nina, all because of love. You think it’s something you want, but all it does it break you until you’re bleeding away on the floor. You’re never the same after your heart is broken. Every time your heart breaks, you lose a piece of yourself. My heart has been broken too many times, I don’t want the same to happen to you. Do you want that, Nina? Do you want to be a broken, heartless shell of yourself?” John’s voice, quiet and numbing, shatters me. I am in tears, astounded by his outburst. But I won’t give up.

“John,” I choke out. I don’t even know if I can manage words without jumbling them up with my sobs. I try to calm myself down before spilling all my emotions to John.

“John,” I say once more, gently. His face is pale, his cheeks are flushed, his eyes bright and brimming with tears. I can’t imagine how painful it must have been, telling me about his heartbreaks.

“Love is beautiful,” sums up all of my emotions. “It—it changes people, people that others would have thought could never be changed. Love is priceless, it’s worth all the heartbreak in the world and more. You know the story of my sister and her husband! Everyone said they would never make it. Our own mother told my sister that her husband would get her pregnant, leave her, and break her heart! But he didn’t, John, he stuck around. Their friends said that even if they did stay together, life would be hard on them. Distance and money would tear them apart, but my sister’s going to Columbia, passing her classes with flying colors, and he’s going to law school! Do you see what I mean when love is beautiful? My mom is so cynical about love, I don’t know where I get this want, this need for love from, but it’s just there, and I’m not letting it go. Romeo and Juliet died for love. Jack died keeping Rose warm because he loved her so much, he’d rather die if it meant she didn’t have to. Noah never stopped loving Allie, even when she forgot who he was.” Both John and my eyes were pouring with tears now. How could something so simple bring us to this?

“Those are fucking movies, Nina. Welcome to reality.” John is trying to hold himself together, but I know he’s falling more apart than he ever has.

“Why won’t you just let love in, John?” I ask him, frustrated.

“I did, Nina,” he replies, equally as frustrated, “but it seems my heart just wasn’t home enough.” He walks away again, but this time, I intend for him to stay.

“John! Not all girls are like that! Are you scared to let someone in?” John turns back around, looking furious.

“You have no right to say that, especially when your heart has never been broken,” he growls, his face merely inches away from mine.

“My heart has been broken, John. Millions of times. All by you.” I whisper quietly, and taking a risk, I wrap my arms around his neck and our lips collide. Our lips separate, but only because we’re both at a loss of breath.

“What was that for?” John breathes out.

“I love you,” I whisper, and this time, he wraps his arms around my waist and picks me up and twirls me around, and kisses me when he sets me down.

“I hate love,” he says, and my world crashes down on me. I’m about to pull away when he says, “But I love you too.” So we just stand there, kissing in the pouring rain in the middle of nowhere, kids in love.



It’s been nearly a year and a half since John and I first kissed. We’re lying lazily on his couch, my head in his lap, Toddlers and Tiaras playing on TLC.

“What do you love?” John asks me. I grin.

“You, for one. Definitely rain, after that intense make out session last year. Toddlers in Tiaras. The Maine. Music. I think I actually love Jared more than you,” I joke, and John lightly shoves me.

“What do you love?” I ask teasingly. If I asked John this last year, he’d say nothing.

“You,” is his answer. “What else?” I ask, laughing.

“Love, and other things.”