Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away… oh wait, that’s a completely different story. This is a story about love. But not the love that we know between moms and dads (well, maybe some of the moms and dads that we know), the love that only we can know!

Hi, I’m Geraldine, but my friends call me Gerald. Or Jerry, or Gary… or pretty much any humiliating name that my group of 2 friends can come up with. I’m 5 foot, 0 inches tall; some would say that I’m pretty lanky. I would say that I’m pretty normal-looking. But I don’t really care what other people think. I am me, regardless of how lanky or not lanky I am. I am only in the fifth grade and my largest problem in life is dealing with the proper order of operations. “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally”; quite the conundrum for my brain to handle. My biggest dream of all dreams is to be an astronaut one day or a book writer or a woman with a large beard who thinks about thinking all the time (the severe lack of bearded lady philosophers disturb me). But I haven’t been able to think right since I saw this boy, named Lucas. I’m fairly certain that Lucas is the love of my life. At this very moment, I can only really think about him. Well, him and this journal entry that I’m dictating.

Let me tell you a bit about Lucas. He has copper hair, with longish eyebrows. His brown eyes are rather nondescript, but I love them exactly because of that. He’s exactly 4 foot, 5 and one-quarter inches tall. So he’s a little shorter than me, but I don’t mind at all. Lucas is the most beautiful person I have ever seen in my entire 10 years of life. We have been in the same town since the first grade. But he goes to the school on the other side of town. When I first saw Lucas at Mr. Kerosene’s Hot Dog Emporium, there was the cliché angelic glow around him and symphonic hymns that I’ve seen and heard with the other boys that I’ve fallen in love with. But with him there was something different. He made me feel something that I have never, ever felt in my entire life. It was as if nothing else mattered. Not my dreams, not my friends, not my anything. I just felt like I was floating in nothingness with him. Just a blank canvas for us to create just about anything we wanted. He made me want to simultaneously melt with excitement for the possibilities of our infinite future, while making me feel like the most proactive person who has ever walked upon the Earth. He wanted me to show the entire world what I had inside of my head. This feeling is something that I can only adequately (actually, not adequately at all) describe as love.

My dad tells me that I am too young to understand true love, like what he and Barbarette have. But I’m convinced that I do love this boy. I’ve seen that Bill Cosby show “Kids Say the Darnedest Things,” and I’m pretty sure that what I’ve described is one of the “darnedest things” that this kid has ever said. Maybe that’s what Mr. Cosby meant. In a world filled with adults constantly looking for themselves and redefining who they are, maybe all it takes is me, a 10-year-old lady with a kinda boyish name to break down exactly what everyone is looking for in life… their Lucas. Their person who makes them feel like nothing else matters.

Only we, the children, know what true love is. Much like how only we, the children, know the truth behind Trix cereal. Love isn’t just some switch that I can turn off or something that I can forget. Love is the absolute consuming of my body with the greatest feelings one hundred thousand-million percent of the time.

But what do I know? I’m only 10.