A friend and I are taking a journey, or what we have un-cleverly called a ‘Creative Collaboration’, to exercise our creative muscles and make no excuses about our desire to make and try and explore.

And this was my first question, for us to explore writing… as a beginning step into me re-inventing this site once again into a place of further collaboration and creativity but with the whole world! We will see if I get there… but there is no more excuse for not trying.

So, long tangent, run-on sentence short - my question was, “ When did you first experience love?” or “ When did you first love someone or knew they loved you?”

My friend gave an answer, and now it’s my turn, terms of our agreement to push each others creative juices. And, I am sitting.. writing before thinking… in hopes that something will magically come to mind. So we wait.

And there it is, stuck. Like I’m sure my friend was for a time. Where do you start, a sentence she included in her writing as well. I would like to easily say I remember it when I was young. But I think love is one of those concepts that it takes a lot of life experience to truly accept feeling. I’m sure as a kid I repeated it to family and friends. I don’t know that it meant anything.

Until the end of high school. Maybe even specifically the second year in college. Wait. I know that I had to dabble with it a bit in middle school, that’s when I first lost someone.

My grandmother, paternal. She died from cancer. My aunt said grandma knew this was the time. I used to go to her house after school until my parents could pick me up from school. She’s someone who would hold me accountable to some of the lessons I learned in school. She’d like to know what I was learning, how things where going. I didn’t get it at the time. But it later made a mark on my heart.

And just like that in 7th grade I believe, she was gone. I didn’t know anything about death at the time, and I recall asking my parents about it one time in the xl expedition or yukon my dad had at the time. Some long car ride either to a soccer game ( I played on a traveling team) or a vacation. I know there was talk about heaven and that being overwhelming for my adolescent brain. I just remember sitting in the third row of the truck contemplating life and death and heaven and the universe and how my grandmother was never going to be in the same form again, that I was currently inhabiting.

That left deep longing, I presume it was love. I felt like I had missed something. I still remember my older cousin crying heavily at her funeral. I remember being amongst the crowd, young, understanding and not understanding. And I remember wanting people to know I loved her and I knew she loved me. I’m not sure that I still understand today, why I knew she loved me. Maybe it’s because she would pick me up from school and ask me questions. Maybe that’s why one of my love languages now is quality time. So many things to ponder with this event and my development.

But I would say that was my first comprehension. And perhaps that’s why though I found myself often angry at my parents throughout their almost divorce at the end of middle school, and their actual divorce while I was in college, the moments that I saw them rawly - mostly my mom, being near, being asked questions, being near, are the times I would say that love makes sense to me.

So I guess my answer is, my first love experience was when my grandmother showed me what it meant to be near.