Editor's Note: "Love At 20" is part of Michael Juliani's poetic series, "From Young Rooms."

Thinking you’re falling in love scatters all these scenes in your head that get demented and tinted and smell different in memory. Perhaps a smell from the calmest you’ve ever felt on vacation, the ocean and pineapple, or the fried crisps of lightbulbs or how you’d imagine a palm tree smells when it’s burning. Love images get all sepia or lilac. Spent, important, burdens on the beast. They’re sped through, a second long, yanked by a sweaty rope through the brain behind the mind’s eye.

Love at 18 or 20 isn’t so much love as it’s letting your guts burn for however long it lasts. It’s more a tortured experience of the self than anything—teaching yourself lessons in the hopes you have for the hopelessness of this other person who’s afraid of you, who seems better off in her distance, her responsibilities, her ability to live without you even though you want to suck on each other like crack pipes.

The supermarket parking lot, her CDs (some, bad) slipping around beneath the radio. Her car smelling like sun-smoked ointments. The sun setting over the 10 Freeway so the haltering scraps of litter on the street shine, aluminum. Her hair always clean, yours always like thin strips of tree bark. Leaving class, needing her, fingers ringing with heartbeat on your straight run to her blind-covered window and tapping (flicking) it with your fingernail and waiting for that smooth makeup-less corpse face to appear unsmiling but throttled and not letting you see. In the nine months I came closest to falling in love I rarely drank but always wanted something that doesn’t have a name. Girls get affection from each other, too much of it. Young men can go for months and years without touching another soul.

When lust lasts too long to be considered considerate, there goes that bad man again. A disc with all of Led Zeppelin on it somehow. Our favorite: “Tangerine.” All the fathers I’ve met—in their socks, glad to be home from work, in front of the television, their testosterone in its last decade or two.

Away at school, bra straps showing. Bedrooms splashed with loud color, pictures of Marilyn Monroe and that Naval seaman home from war dipping and kissing the nurse. Maybe incense if she’s one of those types…beads hung in her doorway. Maybe your jacket left over from the last slow goodbye. “You forgot this last time.” Her room’s breathed in and your only available sense is sight. The rest has surrendered, rigor mortis, slack-jawed. Conversation’s just laughs or nonsense headlong from nerves and mutual understanding that you gotta kiss sometime soon. Goof on the people outside, build up the courage.

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