First Girl I Loved

Well, I haven’t seen you now since many the short year

But there are some people whom time does not take from us because, having once possessed them, even if only for that brief and foolish season when possession itself was still something we believed the world granted rather than something it merely seemed to grant, we have already begun, without knowing it, to lose them; and perhaps that is why, after all these years, I still find myself returning to you, not to the girl you became nor to the woman who must now exist somewhere beyond the geography of my remembering, with her house and her car and perhaps the children whose voices have filled rooms in which my name has never been spoken, but to that first girl whom I loved, the one who existed at seventeen and therefore existed in a world before the world had learned to close its doors.

When I was seventeen, I used to know you

That age which seems, when one is seventeen, not an age at all but a condition of the universe, as though youth were not something passing through us but something permanent which the old had merely forgotten, and I knew you then, knew the way a boy knows a girl before either of them has acquired the knowledge by which men and women later come to know one another, before desire has learned its disguises and love has learned the long vocabulary of absence, and there was your hair, that long red hair, falling down around our faces when I kissed you, enclosing us for those few seconds in a little red darkness which seemed not merely private but eternal, as though outside it there were no years, no departures, no churches, no cities, no strangers who would one day occupy the places where we had been.

Well, we parted so hard

I remember it as the last time because I know now that it was, though of course I did not know it then, the cruelty of all last times, that they arrive wearing the ordinary clothes of an ordinary afternoon or evening, saying nothing of themselves, offering no warning, so that we leave them as casually as we have left a hundred other moments, only afterward discovering that the door through which we passed has already closed behind us. You told me you had joined the Church of Jesus, and I heard you, though what I remember now is not the doctrine or the words but the fact that you were already becoming someone whom I could not follow, someone standing at the edge of another country, while I, who had not yet learned that people can love one another and still become strangers, stood there believing that if I left first I would somehow be the one who had chosen the ending.

If I was lyin’ by you now, I wouldn’t be here at all

I had to go, I have told myself for years, and because the sentence has been repeated so often it has acquired the authority of truth, though perhaps all it proves is that a man can repeat a justification until he can no longer remember the wound which required it; I had to go, I had to grow, I had to become whatever it was that waited beyond the streets we knew, beyond your red hair and my seventeen years and the impossible little future which, while we were inside it, seemed not only possible but inevitable.

Me rushing 'round Britain with a guitar

I went there because a guitar could be carried where a life could not, because music offered the appearance of motion without requiring one to say what one was fleeing, and I rushed from room to room, from street to street, from one temporary embrace to another, making love to people whose names sometimes seemed less important than the fact that they were not you, people whom I did not even like to see, and afterward I would lie awake wondering whether this was what growing was supposed to feel like, this accumulation of faces, this widening of the distance between the boy who had kissed you and the man who could lie beside a stranger without asking why he was there.

And I still sometimes think of you

Not always, not every day, not in the bright hours when a man can persuade himself that the past is merely the past, but at six in the morning, when the night has spent itself and the first grey light begins to enter the room without yet becoming day, when the body is tired enough to surrender its arguments and the mind, which has been guarding its doors all night, forgets to lock one, there you were; and again at midnight, when the silence of the house becomes so complete that even the smallest memory acquires weight, there you were, your face before me, not the face perhaps that you possess now but the face which memory, that most faithless of witnesses, insists upon preserving.

Well, I would think of you

Yes, I mean in the sick, sad morning and in the lonely midnight, trying to hold your face before me, memory chooses. It takes the red hair and the kiss and the seventeen years and the parting, and it throws away the thousand hours between them, the ordinary words, the petty disagreements, the weather, the boredom, the moments when we must surely have looked at one another and seen not eternity but simply two young people who did not know what to do next; and then it brings back only what hurts, because pain, unlike happiness, seems to possess the strange virtue of believing itself permanent.

We never slept together

And yet, in the country of seventeen, we must have made love a thousand times, because what else was that long red hair falling around our faces, what else was the hunger which had nowhere to go, what else was the knowledge, terrible and innocent at once, that the body could desire what the world had given it no place to possess? We had no room to go to, no house, no door that belonged to us, no future into which we could simply step and close the door behind us; and so we made a kind of life out of the absence of a life, imagining the bed in which we never slept, the mornings we never woke together, the children who never came, the thousand ordinary mornings which would have been so ordinary that we might eventually have forgotten them — and perhaps it is precisely those imagined mornings that I remember now.

You have probably lived them

Maybe there was a house. Maybe there was a man. Perhaps there were children running through rooms where your seventeen-year-old self would no longer recognize the grown-up female stranger standing in the doorway; perhaps there was a car in the driveway and a kitchen full of dishes and some winter morning when you stood at the window watching snow or rain or nothing at all, and if I had been lying beside you then, if somehow the years had bent backward and placed me there, I know only that I could not have remained the man I became, because the nearness of you would have demanded the return of everything I had spent those years becoming.

And perhaps you would not have known me

That is the part I cannot forgive time for, though time cannot be forgiven because it has no ears and no conscience and no understanding of what it has done: that the girl I loved has become a woman I would meet as a stranger, and that the boy who loved her has become a man whom she would perhaps not recognize at all. I say I had to go. I say I had to grow. But sometimes, lying awake in that hour between night and morning, I wonder whether going was merely another name for growing because I needed it to be, whether I had confused distance with change, whether the miles between New York and that first kiss ever made me older or merely made me farther away; and if I had stayed, if I had chosen the room with you rather than the road without you, perhaps I would have become someone else, perhaps better, perhaps worse, perhaps simply someone whose memories would have been different, and there is no way to know because every life is built not only from what happens but from the infinite number of things that did not happen and therefore remain forever perfect.

So it’s goodbye, first love

Not goodbye to you, because I do not know where you are, and not goodbye to the woman you became, because I never knew her, but goodbye to that first love which still sometimes rises in me as though it had been waiting all these years for the particular hour when I would be weak enough to hear it; goodbye to the girl of seventeen, to the red hair, to the kiss beneath it, to the city before the city, to the boy with the guitar who believed that leaving was the same thing as becoming.

And I hope you're fine

I hope the house was kind to you. I hope the years, which have been neither kind nor cruel to me because years are incapable of either, have given you what they gave me only after taking something else away.

I have a sweet woman now

A true friend of mine (she’s pretty), and perhaps someday she will have children by me, and perhaps one of those children, looking at me with that grave and incomprehensible attention children sometimes give their fathers, will ask me what I was like when I was young, and I will tell him or her that I was seventeen once, that I loved a girl with long red hair, that I left her because I believed I had to go in order to grow, and that for all the years since I have been learning the difference between leaving a place and escaping it, between forgetting and forgiving, between the life we actually live and the lives which, because they were never lived, remain forever waiting for us somewhere in the dark.

Your face before me

I will say only that sometimes, at six in the morning, when the room is neither night nor day, I can still feel that red hair falling across our faces, and for one instant I am seventeen again, and the world has just begun and nothing has happened yet.