There was a tragic story out of Florida recently involving a police officer and some teenage lovers who were running away from home to be together. All three ended up dead when the boy shot the officer, and then his girlfriend and himself. The letters the two had written each other are touching, and sad and reminded me how incredibly intense life and love are when you’re that age. And how easy it is for kids in love to do something horrifying when they feel like someone is trying to come between them.
Things are so much harder emotionally at that age. Before you learn to dull things down so they are more bearable. Before you learn that things get better, that things change. Before you learn to put up a little bit of shielding between your heart and the world. Before you learn that things will be OK.
You may disagree with me about this, but I think that teenagers can fall in love. I don’t know if it’s common, but I have no doubt at all that it is possible. I don’t think it’s “Puppy Love” or a crush, or “just hormones.” It’s real, and it’s overwhelming.
When very young people do fall in love, it is particularly intense and hard to get over for a lot of reasons. How many people do you know who have never forgotten their first love? There is a lot of emotion that is hard to let go of. It’s a combustible time. Combustion is memorable. It leaves a mark. In the case of these two and the officer they killed, the combustion was deadly.
Did it have to be?
Part of the tragedy here relates to how easily a kid was able to get his hands on a gun and use it. Someone else can have that discussion.
When you’re a teenager, you’re a hormonal and emotional hurricane in a body that is changing every minute. Everything is new. Everything is big. When you fall in love it seems like that is all there is. It feels like you will die if you lose it. You hope you do die. You just don’t have the kind of shielding to protect yourself from the flood of feelings that an adult does. That makes an already intense feeling even more so. Much more so. Add in how hormonally souped up you are, and newly discovered sexual feelings directed at someone you just can’t keep your hands off of and you have something that will be hard to recover from if it ends. Which it almost always does. Usually not in a tragedy.
So these two kids wanted nothing but to be together, and their families wanted them to be apart. For reasons that seem totally rational to an adult, but insane to a teenager.
To them, it must have felt like the whole world was against them. It kind of is. The world isn’t kind to kids in love. They aren’t kind to the world, either.
Three people are dead because no one could figure out what to do about a couple of kids who loved each other. It isn’t a new story.
Maybe someday we’ll figure out what to do.
Note: this started life as a bit of an ode to how wonderful and overwhelming first love is. Then I read this story, and it wasn’t anymore. When I compare my own experience with this, there’s obviously a very different outcome…but I found myself really identifying with the poor dead girl who just wanted to be happy writing lists of things that were going to be wonderful in their life together.