In second grade, I slept on the top bunk, with a fuzzy purple diary tucked under my pillow. I was entranced by its lock and key. The notion of guarding my own secrets was mystical. I scribbled little nothing entries about who was my best friend or who I hated, and a few questioning the existence of Santa, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, and God. I tore them all out and threw them away; they didn’t seem significant enough for a diary with a lock. 

What belonged in such a sacred book? Answer: The biggest and most important secret of all. One night I smuggled a pencil up the ladder into bed with me, and hid it under the floral covers when my mom kissed me good night. Once everything was very quiet and I was sure that all my family was sound asleep, I pulled out my pencil and then my diary from underneath my pillow. By the soft moonlight coming in through the window, I found the tiny silver keys and unlocked the diary; I opened it to the first blank page. Solemn and silent, my hand shaking in the dark, I wrote in a scraggly, anxious script, to pour out the very depths of my heart upon the page. When it was done, I tucked it back under the pillow, and stared up at the ceiling trying to go to sleep. For weeks and weeks after, when I knew I would not be caught, I would pull the diary out from under my pillow, unlock the cover and peer at the words I had written that night. 

I like Eli. 

“No one can ever know!” I thought then, “I would die if my parents found out.” My younger self would feel so deeply betrayed to know I am writing this now, all these years later exposing her one precious secret. How my heart aches for her, so anxious to be found out, so intensely guarding that secret heart. 

Amaia begged me to let her braid my hair. She is 8 years old and she is obsessed with crushes. As she braids my hair, she tells me about her crush. He is a boy in the next town who likes climbing trees and whose favorite color is red. “I like him because he’s nice,” she told me. When her brother came into the room to ask her mom for help with homework, she threw her arms around her mom and cried, “No! Don’t leave! We’re talking about crushes!” and leaned her head dreamily on her mother’s arm. Oh, to be so bold! So brazenly dreamy. So fearless in your confessions. At her age, I would have been appalled by the idea of sharing such intimate secrets–and with my mother, of all people. As a child, I would have thought her childish. As an adult, I admire her spirit. 

I get coffee with an old friend and tell him about this adorable scene. “It’s funny,” he remarks, “how the feelings are all the same,” and he tells me about his tortured infatuation. He wants a woman and cannot have her. We circle round and round the problem of doomed love until we both leave feeling a little depressed. I consider his theory that the feelings are all the same. Not all the feelings, surely, but some remain with us. Our child selves lay out vague blueprints for the sorts of lovers our adult selves will become. We all come into the world so primed for longing. I imagine my friend 15 years ago, just as tortured by love: a little boy lying solemn and resigned on the school yard field watching the clouds pass overhead with a sigh. 

Another friend is far more hopeful, describing that same instinct for enthusiastic expression I saw in Amaia: “I wrote ‘I love Kylie’ all over everything,” he tells me of his first crush. I imagine the red notebooks covered in sharpie, and little Kylie herself perhaps a bit overwhelmed by the display. 

“Love.” I never would have thought of that. I think over my entry and must admire the simplicity of my big confession, so anxiously scrawled and jealously guarded. I did not write “I love Eli”; I was not, at 7 years old, prone to exaggeration or grandiosity. Was I hedging my bets even then? Was I a realist? I cannot say that I remember for sure. Maybe I thought I was too young for real love anyway, that real love ought to be pretty special, that it’s best saved for later. If we come into the world primed for longing, maybe we also come into the world primed for skepticism. Still, I felt the overwhelming butterflies in my stomach that staved off sleep; I would stare up at the ceiling in the night and think of a boy. I was plagued with a simultaneous need for expression, and its concealment.There is a magic in hiddenness, in words asking for no reply: “I’m just whispering to myself so I can’t pretend that I don’t know,” Bob Dylan sings. “I like Eli” sat lonely on its page, a Sapphic fragment, a little world unto itself. The fact of my liking was magic enough, an event all on its own; the feeling was self-contained. 

How else are the feelings the same? I consider the sensation. Butterflies in the stomach, yes, yet still more like a lightning strike, a shudder, a quake. It is the shock of Encounter. The sudden knowledge of the other is a blow to the mind. It is the jolt of cold water on a warm and unexpecting body. 

It is the same as tasting a tannic wine. The wine brings a warm tingle to my cheeks and then to my chest; that shocking sensation from the tannins fills the mouth like a sparkle, a little lightning strike at the back of the cheeks that makes me break into a smile. Tannins are a preserving agent in plants, protecting plants from predation. They’re the same thing that makes an unripe peach too bitter to indulge in, creating a sour dryness that coats the mouth. The glimmer of tannins represents newness. That first astringent pleasure foretells the softness, sweetness, and richness that is yet held like a private secret. 

Jade Oates is the editor-in-chief of The Mandarin.