Music has this really cool power of transporting you back in time.
I suggest that you read this post as the song plays in the background so you can fall into your emotions with me.

I have the pleasure of being surrounded by artists.  I get to learn about new mediums of art every single day.  In the same vane, the majority of my music taste has been shaped by one of my best friends who is as obsessed with music as I am with poetry (which is a whole lot).
She showed me “Thinkin Bout You” by Frank Ocean in 2012, around the time it came out.  We were both seniors in high school, both going through major heartbreak.  We would sit together and listen to this song on repeat.  We would sing lines to each other randomly.  When this song hit the radio, we were both so excited and jammed out whenever we heard it.
Why were we listening to slow love songs in an effort to mend our broken hearts? We were masochists, obviously.  But somehow this song encapsulated everything we were feeling.  This song reminds me of what it felt like to be in love for the first time: the innocence; the dreams of forever; the act of laying in bed and thinking of that person until you fall asleep; the hope that they were thinking about you too.
Love often feels like a tornado.  It comes into your life and makes a mess out of you.  You find yourself thinking about forever with a person that you just met yesterday.
I remember when I graduated from high school I firmly believed that I would never get over my first love.  I could clearly picture ten years from then (six years from now).  I would be engaged to another man.  I would be strolling down the streets of New York City, just casually sipping a cup of coffee, when I would see him in the mass of people.  He would come up to me and say he made a big mistake and I would drop everything and run into his arms again.  I was so adamant in the idea that I would never fall in love with anyone else.  This is silly because I, of course, did fall in love with somebody else.
But whenever I listen to this song, I am transported back to the time when I innocently loved.  I am transported to crying in the back corner of my U.S. Government classroom with my best friend because we both felt like the loves of our lives didn’t love us back.
Oddly enough, I am also transported to the summer before my freshman year of college.  I am transported back to picking up the pieces of my heart with someone cheering me on.  I am transported to finding a newer, greater love even when I thought that no such thing existed.  I am transported to the summer of falling in love with myself.
So maybe I wasn’t thinking so far ahead.  Maybe love is blind.  But now, when I think about forever, I don’t even see him in my vision.  I do see myself smiling though.

– Michelle Cherian