This Feels Like a First Love

Sitting in bed on a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon, I read through the emails we sent each other last Christmas. These are what I like to call our post-breakup emails. I reread them from time to time and feel a familiar ache, as if a wound inside never healed and your words, our words, pierce through my skin, drill through my bones, and poke at the wound like a rascal would. It may seem cliche but I really don't know what the future holds for us, you wrote, if we'll get back together, if we're meant for each other.

I don’t know if we’d ever get another shot, I said.

I've lost count of the times I've read and reread that final correspondence. Each time I felt a twinge of sadness, of disappointment. On some days, there was anger too. A raw and unforgiving anger that burned like wildfire. Sometimes I felt regret too and wished I hadn't fallen in love with you. My whole 2011 felt wasted on a relationship in which I had invested so much time and emotion, which left me with a splintered heart. At first, I welcomed the idea of a second chance, but I eventually buried it in the murkiest part of my consciousness, along with what remained of the love I had for you.

You see, when I contacted you again six months after we broke up, I was over you 100%. Sure, there were times when I still felt the rush of anger, but they were nothing more than a small wrinkle in the perfectly ironed fabric of my happier life. All I had to do was run my hand through the crease and everything would be almost-perfect again. I was surrounded with people who loved and cared for me. I had the job I had wanted since college. I had someone with whom I felt a special connection, who could have taken the space you once occupied if he tried.

Until that text message happened. I didn't think I was treading on dangerous ground at all. I felt safeguarded by my interest in another and by the certainty that our story had reached its hapless ending. There was no rewriting or continuing that story, I thought, especially since I was convinced things were really over for you too. So how did we end up where we are now?

I don't know how it happened to you, but this was how it was for me. When I asked you if you have moved on (without specifying what it was you've moved on from) and you said you have, I cried. I said I have too, and it was true, except after that, it wasn't anymore. See, this is the problem with feelings. They either leave you or you consciously drive them away, only to come back and haunt you at the most inopportune moments. If they remain underground, in the casket in which you buried them, good, but if they don't, you're screwed, because they come back stronger.

I'm not really screwed though. I mean, I felt I was, at first, that night I realized I loved you again. Or that I loved you still. I don't feel like that anymore. You know what this feels like, more than anything? A first love, that's what.

This feels like a first love.

This feels like a slow bike ride in a drizzle, a popsicle on a hot summer afternoon. This is forgetting to do your homework because your brain had turned into a bowl of alphabet soup and the letters in it are only those found in the other person's name. This is staying up past bedtime talking on the phone about nothing of significance, but those nights, those moments would feel like the best ones until you get to the part where you kiss for the first time.

This feels like plucking petals off a flower chanting he loves me, he loves me not, except this doesn't have that uncertainty anymore. You love me and I'm sure of it. And I love you too, more than ever, more than I did all the other boys of yesteryear. I sometimes wonder if I ever really loved anyone before this, and maybe I have, but not like this.

And maybe that's why this feels like a first love. Maybe a first love is what this really is. :)