The Stories I Needed When I Was Younger

When I was fifteen, I was looking for love the way a teenager looks for everything — urgently, dramatically, with the kind of intensity that turns any feeling into a storm.

Back then, I wanted fairy tales.
Or maybe I wanted permission to believe that love could be an explosion: butterflies in the stomach, goosebumps for no reason, a spark so loud the whole world would hear.

I looked for that kind of love in books.
And most of the time, it’s exactly what I found: chaos, extremes, impossible coincidences, drama stacked on drama as if love only mattered when it hurt enough to be memorable.

At fifteen, I didn’t know better.
Because as a teenager, we read love the way we feel life — chaotic, immature, insecure.
We mistake intensity for importance.
Noise for passion.
Hurricanes for destiny.

But life, gently and slowly, teaches something else.
Love grows quieter as we grow older.
Not smaller — quieter.
Which is not the same thing at all.

Love becomes the laugh you didn’t expect.
The loyalty you didn’t have to earn.
The companionship that doesn’t demand performance.
The soft joy of knowing someone sees you even when you’re tired, messy, or lost.
Love becomes a home you don’t need to renovate every weekend.
It becomes calm — which is not the absence of passion, but the presence of safety.

Today, I write the love I needed back then.

The kind that stays.
The kind that makes sense.
The kind that lasts because it isn’t constantly trying to prove itself.

In my stories, Maya and Tomás rebuild love in the pauses — in the quiet cups of coffee, in the blueprints left on a table, in the breath between two difficult truths.

Mariah and Thomas discover that love doesn’t need to be logical to be real — it just needs to be honest, consistent, human.

Marcus and Stella learn that sometimes love is simply choosing each other on ordinary days, without grand declarations or perfect timing.

These are not loud loves.
They don’t break down doors or scream across airports.
They don’t rely on destiny to justify chaos.

They are possible loves.
The kind we live in real life.
The kind that grow not because they’re dramatic, but because they’re true.

Perhaps this is why I write the stories I write.
Not to recreate the fairy tales I once chased,
but to offer the love I wished someone had shown me earlier —
the love that feels like coming home to yourself.