Tears streaming down her face, the girl ran up the stairs and into her room, slamming her door shut. Collapsing onto her bed, she cried until the sky was darkening and there were no tears left. Finally, when the street lights flickered on, she sat up.

Moving wearily to her desk, the girl sat down in the chair, turned on the lamp, and pulled the dictionary that she had used for last night’s English homework, out from under the precarious stack of textbooks. Opening the dictionary, she found her way to the “L”s, and then the “lo”s, and finally, by skimming down the page past entries such as “loupe”, a small magnifying glass, and “lovage”, a Mediterranean perennial plant, she found the desired word.

love (l?v) n. A deep, tender feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arriving from kinship or a sense of oneness.


Fingers tracing the words, over and over, back and forth, the girl thought of the past year and three months. “A deep tender feeling of affection and solicitude”: yes, there had been that. She that from when she looked into his warm brown eyes, and she knew that her eyes had shown the same. “toward a person”: she was pretty sure they both counted as that: no vampires or werewolves like Twilight. “Such that arriving from a kinship or sense of oneness”: The girl ignored the first part of that and focused on “a sense of oneness.” How right he was: the person who had written this dictionary. How many times had she marveled at the feeling of wholeness when they were together? How many times had she felt the feeling of being incomplete gnaw at her when they were apart? Yes, the author had done quite a good job writing this definition. The girl just felt that they had left out one very important thing. Picking up a pen, she bent her head over the dictionary. A few seconds later, she lay the pen back down, turned off the lamp, and, glancing regretfully at the backpack that held all of the homework that she should have finished, the girl slid under the covers and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Later that night, as the moon was raised high into the sky, a sliver of its light fell onto the page still open on the desk. Written in a neat, sure hand in the margins beside the entry for “love,” was penned four words: “Often followed by heartbreak.”

heartbreak (härt’ br?k’) n. Overwhelming sorrow, grief, or disappointment.