There is no love as great nor as memorable as your first, something. I have learned all too well and gratefully. Your first love precedes the rest, setting the expectations and tones of love’s sensation, touch, and presence. First loves are the preeminent first impressions. Instantaneously, you’ll know love in a way that can only be derived from feeling it at its purest and most intimate, and yet, you will be slightly disappointed by the many, although wonderful, loves that come after. A first love matures you like a fine emotional wine. Suddenly you go from younger to older in the blink of an eye, and the logic is faulty but coveted. Amidst a first love, you amass a more mature sense of self, one that deviates from the present physical self, instead grounding yourself in the kind of hope that accompanies the future; a you that is both then and now, what is and what is to be. You are both playing out and holding potential. What is special about first love is difficult to put into words, a tangible description, for it defies the mundanity of reality and logic. First love is both corporeal and ethereal—here today, gone tomorrow. The first time you fall in love, the love itself is so delicate an experience that it’s something to be treasured even as you are living it. You never forget the love that was your first, even when you love another.Â
I first fell in love when I was fourteen years old. He was perfect— at least to me. He was the spitting image of an Italian, albeit pubescent, dream; dark and gloriously shiny brown eyes, glistening and smooth brown hair, a hint of black astray amidst the rich Tuscan brown, and the most visually soft lips. He had a smile that was hesitancy bubbling over, both endearing and attractive to me, which sent my heart fluttering each time his nerves preceded any apparent display of reciprocation. He managed to make a pair of Adidas flip-flops cheeky, and a pair of worn athletic sweatpants a handsome casual jock aesthetic. Most impressively, and exotically, he was a chef in training. Fresh off a Chopped Jr. victory, he was my hometown’s teenage celebrity, precociously suave and windswept by the culinary arts. Needless to say, I was instantly infatuated with the expert way he, a fourteen-year-old boy, seared a goat porterhouse. His crisp, clean, and stark white chef’s coat was a culinary tuxedo, elevating him beyond the sartorial status of a typical ninth grader. He was a being more adolescent than a Greek God, but so much more appealing than any ancient ideation turned classical sculpture manifestation.Â
We met atypical to the prototypical adolescent meet-cute: through my mother’s perky, wild, slightly hippie, southern massage client. Her flamboyant drawl was a loudness that instilled even more awkwardness into the percolating tension between us. His father, a successful VIP of an energy company, was as wealthy as he was quintessentially Italian; scant slightly oily hair, and crisp shirt that saw the aggressive under-the-table ways of business deals, and Euro-tanned skin. His house was large and sleek, modern in such a way that his wealth was apparent, and success was a message communicated by choice of opulent although ultra-modern decor. Nonetheless, I found myself sinking into a world on the opposite side; mansions and grand and unnecessary topiaries, house additions, lavish Tempurpedic mattresses, tender buttery cuts of meat, and floors whose ability to emanate echoes showcased cold hard cash success. I walked into a world half blind, fully inundated, and as I fell into this world of first-rate food and Fortune 500— I fell more in love with the Italian adolescent right in front of me.Â
He was excellently awkward, in that way where his emotional delicacy inundated the energy between us with a fragility that reminded me how blissfully real we were, and what we were experiencing was real too. Our eye contact was brief, an interaction of our not-so-subtle romantic suppressions surfacing. Still, he was the Alfa to my Romeo, and we fused instantly, a connection sustained by our mutual liking of the finer things in life. Together, we reached the most elite status a fourteen-year-old couple could reach, enthusiastically indulging in grass-fed pork belly cojita sprinkled tacos, pink peppercorn ice cream, succulent duck fat fries, and herb reductions so spicy, sour, and rich, it dropped off our lips, hanging just like the kiss that would almost come but ceased to be placed. Many a Michigan night, hours flew by as we conversed obsessively about sports, accompanied by the most tender cut of meat, melting on our palates, a combination of flirtation of fat, salt, and seduction. Amidst the roar of the crowd and the tectonic boom of Soulja Boy, we attempted to move forward in our intimacy at local college basketball games. Although sweat stained my face, and my leggings clashed with my sweatshirt, I never felt more beautiful; his masculine and cherubic face glanced at me, his laugh subtle and soft but through its endearing fragility able to be picked out of the stadium’s raucous. These nights ended in awkward porch glances, intense, the moonlight a spotlight on us in our pubescent seduction, attempts to kiss a sincere desire but a failed execution per shyness’ intervention. As we continued to converse about recruiting classes over duck confit, there was a nervousness that was mixed with a comforting familiarity. I was so nervous to be around him it was as if I was on the verge of losing my breath. Yet, I could speak to him with a vulnerable honesty that was lacking in other conversational contexts. When he delicately caressed my hand, holding it in the pudgy palm of his own, I knew I loved him without having to tell him. There was love where silence lay in lieu of a declaration and that was what felt so irreplaceable. Our connection was love, for it was rare to feel so rarefied and grounded simultaneously. It was just me and my Italian dream, until, like all things beautiful and precious in their youth, it wasn’t.Â
Your first love slightly ruins the loves that follow. It isn’t a violent, depressing, or a sad destruction or tainting of the love you experience once you and your first soul connection part. Rather, the ruination is more of a rude awakening, a disappointment that infiltrates the conceptuality of love once you are no longer innocent to it. Once you have moved on from your first love, you are awakened to the expectations, trials, and tribulations that one doesn’t see when experiencing love for the very first time. Yet, that is because first love demands you walk in blind; your innocence is a prerequisite for the experience and the enjoyment. You are in unfamiliar territory, a landscape of community and concepts, touches and glances, that you are decoding the very moment you are experiencing. You cannot know the impurity that taints love post-first love, for you are figuring out that which you are still beginning to understand, an ongoing conceptualization of knowing that which you do not currently know. Your first love feels more than exists as a tangible thing; inexplicably and simultaneously a touch both light and deep, like an amorous hummingbird flittering against the flower that is your heart. After your first love, you have been awakened to the realities that make love feel less like fantasy and a dream come true, and instead more like a concept that is desired but all too touched by reality and its paintbrush of mundanity. Suddenly, you realize there are expectations and complications. All too suddenly, a relationship is no longer an unexpected inundation or a glorious privately interpreted experience. Now, a relationship is a whole constructed out of a multiplicity of fragments, and segments of complex consideration. While a separate beauty of its own, love is never the same after the first time. Love does not remain an abstract, illogical, anti-reasoning experience. When love remained abstracted, it was simply love, not construction nor a puzzle that is less emotional and more a stressful and serious critical consideration. Your first love is both splendid and sad. Your heart knows not what you are experiencing, and suddenly, your mind knows what you are.Â
My first love came and went faster than a breeze sweeping my hair up in a frenzy. Almost immediately, I knew that what I felt for him transcended logic and ventured into the subliminal, a sensation and intimacy unlike any other, simultaneously knowable and unknowable. Although my first love bestowed upon me an experience that intimately capitalized off my innocence in the most profoundly breath-taking positive way, what I felt about love has been corrupted by what I now know about love. My eyes have been opened to the beauty and the madness of love; the curtain of first love drawn back, the complicated realities laying unavoidable, right before my eyes. Inevitably, we will all be disappointed by love— and not necessarily by the individual. Perhaps we will be disappointed by love conceptually. The loves that follow our first will each offer us a unique experience, a fundamentally unforgettable sensation, a distinguishable flavor from the rest of the other fellows. Yet, our first love will always remain the most unscathed, gratifying, and emotionally overwhelming in the innocence of ourselves that divinely cracks as we take that leap of love for the very first time. Although now I see love as a construction of fragments and complications, love will always be the potential, a notion fragrant of possibility, and a multiplicity of moments to come. While my first love has left the center of my heart, he will always occupy a recess inside both my soul and heart. He taught me that being in love means to feel it and act it, rather than a string of verbal sentiments. He taught me to treasure the hesitancy in the most intimate of moments. He taught me that when my heart is truly given away, lost in the perfect shuffle of the romantic, when love is love, ignorance of the romantically trivial overwhelms, leaving me with all that is real. Perhaps I cannot love him as I did all those years ago, but he is always with me, located safely in the random and unexpected- songs, photos, and memories. He is always there even if I cannot love him so typically and linearally. Yet, I will always look back and know that when I’ve lost a love such as him, I lose more than him; I’ve lost a bit of the beauty of love in its purest form. I will always try to hold on, reform, and get it back,because when I feel love for him, I’m feeling love in its innocent, unforgettable form.