We were too young when it happened. Too young when it ended.
But we knew what it was.
Our first love.
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A love we’d read about in pretty poetry books and dreamt of – a love we didn’t believe could exist for real until the cynics in us were converted into ardent zealots who pledged themselves to the cause of love! A love that turned us into skeptics, yet again when it fell through!
I won’t lie about it. It hurt. It hurt like all invisible wounds do, far deeper than any pain I’d ever known. Then, came the platitudes. How life’s sucker punch will only make you bounce back stronger. How having your heart ripped out will make you tougher.
Lies. Bullsh*t. Nonsense.
Suggested read: Why letting go of a relationship isn’t as simple as it seems
All destruction weakens. It is a law of nature. No pain or suffering fortifies you. All it does is drag you further and further into a bottomless pit of pain like an anchor that is forever your burden to tow.
What helps? Time.
Image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
Time longer than the situation that broke the heart in the first place.
But time is also a trickster.
In the first few moments, it makes you believe you can intervene, save the relationship from breaking. That if you could show your love just one last time – prove that you’d die for it, suffer for it and yet, ultimately live for it – you will be able to save your first love.
Image source: Pixabay, under Creative Commons License
Next ticks the painful moment of realization- a realization that seeps in deeper as sad tears of futile hope pour out. A realization that soaks every cell of your being with the physical weight of pain- the pain of never being able to be with your first love ever again.
Slowly, slide in the moments of resignation. When your eyes freeze over like the surface of a winter puddle, hopeless in their cold distance from life and yet, your shivering damp insides from uncried tears see no flicker of warmth. None.
And then, after centuries slip away and ages pass by, a stroke of the midnight hour brings in a dawn that the eyes, accustomed to darkness, immediately shy away from. Slowly and steadily, the eyes adjust to the streaming shaft of light, watching the tiny motes of dust dance in the sun rays, as their moves attempt to iron out a subtle, yet beautiful smile crease originating in the corner of your lips to an ear-to-ear position. It doesn’t happen immediately. In fact, a song, a shower or even a familiar face takes you back in time. But you pull through, sometimes, sluggish, sometimes, swift- trying to move ahead from a place from which there is no going backward.
In time, you forget things. Things about your first love that you vowed you’d always remember. Things like how his eyes shone when you teased him or how his hair smelled, fresh and damp from the shower.
Image source: Flickr
Other things you remember- like his touch and how it felt on your skin. You wonder if your skin could have retained it, the way your mind has. You remember how angry you’d get when he turned up late and how he could make you smile, in no time. And just like that, in no time, you hear your bones struggle beneath your flesh, aching for one last feeling of him – one last time.
And you think to yourself- maybe time isn’t as good a healer as people make it out to be.
Featured image source: Google, copyright-free image under Creative Commons License
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