Yes. I have a boyfriend.

No. We are not having sex.

Yes. It's my boyfriend's decision to wait until marriage.

No, I'm not going to try and defend this choice to you. I'm not going to spend an hour listening to you tell me that sex is a part of a healthy relationship, and I'm certainly not going to listen to your advice to tell him to man up, or suck it up, or do any other sort of upwards motion with various parts of his anatomy. I'm not going to listen to you tell me that we have no future together because waiting until marriage leads to a sexless life, infidelity, and possibly the robot apocalypse. I am most definitely not going to listen to you call him names or disrespect him in any way at all. That's a good way to get a knee to the groin.

Oddly enough, I don't have to justify my relationship with you. Turns out I don't have to get the okay from every random person in my life before I date someone, especially not you, guy-whose-last-name-I-can't-fucking-remember.

I am not having sex. And you know what? I am fucking happy. Astonishing. I know.

So for the last goddamn time.
It is none of your business.

I am still waiting for summer, so that I can blow bubbles in my front lawn. My little cousins look up to me. My parents are starting to listen to the words I say.

The mistakes I make are youthful and forgivable, but the victories are adult and meaningful. I have succeeded in enough that I know I am strong, and failed at enough that I have something to look forward to.

"The night is young, and the world is full of endless possibilities." Everything is infinite.

It is still okay if I cry in public if I want to, but I don't.

I am learning that not everything is absolute, but I am still all or nothing.

When I kiss someone, I mean it. I am young and in love, which is the only way to be young.

I am just learning about the strength in my smile and the curve of my hips. My hair is growing longer and my eyes are shining brighter and I will never be a model, but I'm beginning not to care.

I've still got so much future and so much power to make it. I fuck with it and fuck it up and sometimes I just fuck, but that is okay, because I still think that there is an endless supply of myself to go around.
I will rule the world someday.

I am nineteen, and all is well.

When you tell me you love me
you are like a broken-hearted soldier
with a bayonet in his side
who's realized that death is
inevitable
with only enough time to tell
a simple line
to a medic with ears
that burn with all the
deathbed secrets he's
kept so far away from his heart
so he doesn't view your organs
as anything more than machine -
you tell him to find me and give me
one last message that you are sorry
that you never could look me in the eye
and say yourself.

And even though you've never
fought a war or
killed a man,
and our only enemy is
the broken furnace
which we fight with blankets
and fevered love,
you still whisper with soft urgency to me
the way blood gurgles from
the mouth of a
freedom-fighting man.

And I wonder, not for the first time
if the words' only purpose
is because you don't want to have
lived an empty life,
and not because you actually have found
a way to fill it.