When Love Vanishes in an Instant

At the graduation party when I was eighteen, Jacob Taylor introduced me to an adult secret.

I endured the initial discomfort, but secretly smiled the whole way home.

Six years of secret love, from middle school to high school graduation, had finally come to fruition.

I curled up in bed, my fingertips lightly tracing the marks he left behind, as if this could make that moment last forever.

Until the next afternoon, when I returned to school early to retrieve a forgotten notebook and heard Jacob and his basketball teammates laughing in the empty classroom.