For some reason in the twists of memory, the song "A Heart Needs a Home" got me thinking of the first (and only other) time I fell in love. I was debating whether to write about it here, as the other person concerned has this URL, but it's all ancient history by now and while we may remember things differently and experienced some of them differently even at the time, I don't really have anything negative to say.
It hit me hard, because you know, I was at that sort of age, and maybe because I hadn't really dated in high school. (I didn't in college, either, but only because socializing mostly divided into Beer and Bed, and the former were group outings.) When it did hit, it was sudden. We had been friends, just friends for most of my freshman year. Suddenly the world looked like the inside of a Christmas ornament, all perfect and shiny and reflective. Suddenly I was Juliet, and never mind how things turned out for her. I was Iseult, and Guinever and Eve and every romantic heroine, except that this time it was Meant to Be and there would never be any unhappy ending.
There was, of course. He broke it up in spring of my Sophomore year. I can't even remember now if he broke it up because he fell for someone else or if that happened right afterward, but of course that was the heartbreakingest part. And oh, how my heart did break. I cried every night -- though never to my parents, even though I went home for the summer, partly because by then they had become irrelevant to my emotional life and partly because they'd been so prejudiced against the whole relationship even when we were just friends that I'd never come out and admitted when it went beyond that. I think that hurt him more than he told me at the time, too, and it certanly forever lowered my opinion of my parents. The Other Girl dumped him that summer and he used to cry on my virtual shoulder, over the phone, which scraped the scab rawer but led to us hooking back up. Even that second time, things were never as pretty and shiny as they had been at first and as we went on and off over the rest of my college career we'd probably have been much better off forgetting romance and just being "friends with benefits". At least one other guy I was seeing broke it off because I still spent so much time with the First Guy, even in our "off" times -- we worked and had classes together too.
I'll come back and add more here later but I have a meeting now. I'll abbreviate for the moment by saying how glad I am it all happened and how much narrower my life would have been without his early influence.
Posted by dichroic at February 13, 2003 03:59 PM