when i die y'all gotta play this song as they lower me into the ground

                                                 the only man that's never let me down
                                                   besides my dad cause my dad's great

How Casper the Friendly Ghost Taught Me About Love

The 90s Casper movie doesn't get enough credit. I used to love watching that movie as a kid. And my favorite part was at the end of the movie, during a Halloween party. Casper had given up his life (I know he's a ghost, which means he's obviously already dead and gone, but let me continue) to bring Harvey (Kat's, the main girl, father) back to life. Because of his gesture, some random ominous being (which may, or may not be his mother) decides to let Casper become a human for a couple hours in order to confront Kat and tell her how he feels. The situation has a Cinderella-esque nature about it which undeniably adorable. 

They end up dancing at the Halloween party to the most beautifully cheesy 90s slow dance song-

Then, Casper delivers this incredible line.

"Can I keep you?" 

That moment has mesmerized me ever since I was a child. See, I've always been in love with the idea of love. My heart fluttered every time my favorite Disney Channel show involved someone having a crush. And every time there was a kiss, I felt that magic too. It just has always been something that I was fascinated by.

And then, I fell in love myself. Many, many years later as an adult. I felt like I had skipped past all of that fluffy puppy love that you're supposed to experience as a kid or young teenager, and gone straight into that smack-you-in-the-face-try-to-deny-it-but-you-can't-hide-it type of love. 

It was way different than the love that I had been exposed to as a child. It wasn't as easy and formulaic. Everybody's experience of love is different I guess. Mine, in fact, was incredibly odd. 

It was like no emotion that I'd ever experienced before. Love chewed up my brain and my heart until it was some type of crazy mush. At a certain point in time, this person was all that I could think about. I was writing poetry forever, pages on pages, trying to wring the emotion out like a towel. Here's a snippet of how my brain was working while I was chin-deep in love for the first time. 

---------------

"i want you more than words can describe 

yet i'll forever try

to encompass your essence in a single line

let the words spring off the page 

like the butterflies that like to camp in my tummy whenever you walk by 

you intoxicate my vocabulary

i start stumbling into similes and metaphors...."

----------------------

Cute, right? Lines like these just kept spewing out of my brain like a broken garbage disposal. My stickies on my Macbook are full of poems that are love-sick, heart-broken, or just broken in general. It didn't end up working out in the end, but hey, who stays with the person that they first fall in love with anyway? 

What I'm trying to say is, I'm glad my younger self had that innocent child-like view of love to cling onto. Sometimes I wish I could get that back. I wonder about it sometimes...I mean...someday my prince will come right?