Kisses, Not Sonnets: At Seventeen Dreams Do Satisfy

“At seventeen dreams do satisfy because you think the realities are waiting for you further on.”

(L.M.Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables)

Berthe Morisot, Julie Daydreaming, 1894

There comes a point in every romantic soul’s life when the dream is no longer enough. Perhaps the moment has come for me! The poems, the novels, the films, the wistful music in my headphones, the long walks spent narrating my own imaginary love story in my head; once upon a time these things sustained me. Once upon a time it felt enough. More than enough. Even the ache of longing had its own sweetness, its own high. Once upon a time… But now? Now… Well…

Not anymore.

There is a season for dreaming, and then there is a season for living the dream. A season for reaching through the veil of fantasy and touching something real. Kisses, not sonnets, please. The warmth of someone’s hand in mine, not daydreams. My man, not Mr Rochester (Jane already has him anyhow…). A sweet voice whispering sweet words in my ear from the other side of the pillow, instead of empty space in my bed. This is not about impatience. It is not even about desperation. It’s about ripeness. At least that is how I feel. About knowing that I have wandered the fields of your own mind long enough, and now my heart is ready to be known, to be touched, to be heard, to be mirrored.

And yet, the world often tells me – girls like us, people like us to pull back. To be more ‘self-focused.’ To invest only in our careers, our hobbies, our solitude. As though love were a distraction from the real work of becoming. I want to live my novel, not live out vicariously through my beloved nineteenth century heroines like Jane or Marianne Dashwood from Austen’s ‘Sense and Sensibility’.

But some of us know: we become through love. We grow with it. We discover the edges of ourselves in the way we are held, the way we are challenged, the way we are seen.

The girl who once sat on the windowsill, lost in the novels of the Brontë sisters, Rossetti and Rilke’s poems, and slow violins, needed her dreams. They nourished her. But now she wants the real thing. The messy, beautiful, ordinary, extraordinary thing. She wants the real laughter on the late-night streets, real arms around her waist, the real life spoken in tandem, not solitude.

She is not wrong to want it. She is not lacking. She is ready.

Because at seventeen, dreams satisfy. But now, she is ready for the reality that once waited, patiently, beyond the page.