First Love

By Someone Who Knows Better Now and Still Googles Her Anyway

Let’s begin with an assertion that sounds glib but is, upon closer inspection, kind of soul-detonating: first love is the only one we never recover from because it’s the only one we didn’t realize we wouldn’t recover from.

You didn’t brace for impact. You didn’t wear emotional elbow pads. You didn’t know love could even be something you needed protective gear for. You just fell — cartoonishly, like off-a-cliff-Wile-E.-Coyote-legs-kicking-in-air fell, like Icarus descending because it turns out goo sarongs do not make a Wright — because you didn’t know the ground could approach with such velocity. That’s the thing about first love: it’s not just about the other person; it’s about the version of you that didn’t yet suspect you might be a little bit unlovable.¹

I. A Brief But Crucial Taxonomy of Middle School Crush Psychology

First love — true first love — typically occurs during a developmental window wherein your brain is a volatile soup of hormones, self-loathing and dreams of running into your crush at a Scholastic Book Fair while holding a novel that makes you look both sensitive and cool.² You don’t know who you are yet, but take it from one who knows — The Hardy Boys: Running on Fumes ain’t that book. Which means that whomever you love — whomever you decide to love, really, because let’s face it, they probably just had nice shoulders or knew the lyrics to “Paint It, Black” — they become a kind of proxy self. You’re loving them, yes, but you’re also loving who you imagine yourself to be in their presence.

They are, essentially, a mirror you’ve mistaken for a window.³

II. My Own Humiliation, for Scholarly Reference

Her name was Eliza (no it wasn’t), and she had hair (yes she did).⁴ She was, from all rational standpoints, a perfectly normal 8th-grade girl with an above-average sense of smell and a Lisa Loeb vibe (you say I only hear what I want to hear, but this was actually way before Lisa Loeb; think Michelle Phillips, only with shoes). To me — me being a gangly, prematurely philosophical 13-year-old with a Coleco Canadian Electric Football addiction and a voice that cracked every third syllable — Eliza was not just a crush. She was an apotheosis. She was the sunbeam refracted through the sweaty glass of adolescence.

Let’s be clear: we spoke, in total, maybe seven times. Two of these involved a shared science class, once during a fire drill. One involved her asking me if I had gum.⁵ But this did not, in any way, deter the absolute metaphysical certainty I had that we were fated to kiss in the rain during a Doors concert. Girl, you gotta love your man. Girl, you gotta love your man. His voice is squirming like a toad. And so on.

I wrote her poems.⁶ I imagined entire futures in which we lived in a small apartment with mismatched mugs and a shared bowling alley membership. (I also imagined her writing me poems. Which is both sad and kind of sweet, in a “please never tell anyone this” sort of way.)

III. The Collapse, or, Marching Band is the New Purgatory

The official end came when she announced — via what would later have been a class-wide group email⁷ but in our day was a note intended to be passed only to her BFF Joanne Wilsey but intercepted instead by dickish Mr. Woodenmeyer and read aloud — that she was “focusing on marching band right now, NOT BOYS. UGH.” This was the emotional equivalent of being served legal documents by a jazz clarinetist. It should have meant nothing. It wasn’t even addressed to me. And yet I took it as a personal and irrevocable rejection, a line drawn in the sawdust of my soul.

For weeks I wandered the halls of my middle school like a broken-hearted Dickensian orphan, listening to sad songs on my Philco transistor radio in its black leather case and writing vague, accusatory diary entries like “Why do people lie when they say they care?” and “Maybe love isn’t real, just like Santa and joy.”

The worst part? She did nothing wrong. In fact, she had no idea what I was going through.⁸  Which made it, somehow, all the more tragic. It wasn’t just unrequited — it was utterly unnoticed. A private apocalypse.

IV. The Archive of the Heart

So here’s where it gets weird: you never really delete them.

I don’t mean you carry a torch, exactly, or that you pine like a sad widower watching sunsets alone while clutching a dried corsage. I mean that the person, the imprint of that first crush, lives in your memory with a vividness that feels disproportionate, like a minor character in a movie that you swear had more lines but when you rewatch it, they’re in like one scene.

They become a fixed point. A mythologized version of innocence. A souvenir from a time when love was pure, terrible, uncomplicatedly complicated.

Also — and let’s be honest here — you’ve probably looked them up.⁹

And when you do — when you find their LinkedIn or their Zillow listing or their Pinterest board for “Popsicle Stick Menorahs” — you feel something strange and a little sickening. Not because you want them back, but because you want you, then, back. You want to remember what it was like to love someone with no exit strategy. To love like a sparkler, not an oil furnace bearing two dingy air filters clogged with dust bunnies and cat fur. And, by the by, to still have Mum and Dad to watch Green Acres with when not experiencing the sorrows of a very young Werther. (In those days, I just adored a Penthouse view. But that part was without Mum and Dad around.)

V. Philosophy Corner (Optional Reading)

There’s a theory (probably Bergson or Foucault or Derrida or someone like that; certainly French and certainement so vague as to be meaningless) that says our memory of an emotion is often more intense than the emotion itself ever was.¹⁰  That is to say: what you’re grieving isn’t Eliza, or Ben, or Ashley-from-band-camp-who-you-still-dream-about-sometimes-though-you-haven’t-played-the-oboe-in-57-years — it’s you, pre-disillusionment. You, before the heartbreaks and the practicalities and the slow erosion of romantic idealism brought on by split rent and scheduling conflicts and the way real love is about groceries more than fireworks. (Not to mention children. So I won’t.)

First love is proof that the heart is a deeply unreliable narrator. Lonely hunter, you bet.

VI. So What Do We Do With All This?

Honestly? Nothing.

We let it live in the shoebox of our psyche. We honour it without indulging it. We smile when that one song comes on, or when we hear their name in a completely unrelated context and it still makes our stomach do that weird hop. We stop trying to recreate it and instead let it remind us that we were, once, capable of feeling something so big it barely fit inside our ribcage.

And that maybe — if we’re lucky — we still are.

FOOTNOTES:

¹ This is the dark kernel at the heart of most early poetry, emo lyrics and certain corners of Tumblr.

² A short list of currently acceptable novels in case the grandkids are interested: Catcher in the Rye, Looking for Alaska, Perks of Being a Wallflower, anything with a mysterious girl who smells like rain and metaphors.

³ David Foster Wallace himself, whose style you might have noticed being unsuccessfully appropriated here, would probably caution at this point against metaphysical narcissism, but a) he’s dead, and b) he also once wrote 25,000 words about tennis, so whom would he be kidding? We’re all just doing our best.

⁴ This seems like a small detail but trust me, in middle school, “having hair” is often enough. Would that having a natural tonsure enjoyed the same cachet down at the pickleball court in the fall of 2025.

⁵ I did not. I lied and said I had gum but had “just run out,” which remains one of the most pathetic attempts at flirtation in recorded history.

⁶ In one of them I rhymed “alone” with “unknown.” Twice. Gilbert O'Sullivan, eat your heart out.

⁷ Subject line: “Band Practice Update!!!”

⁸ This is the thing about unrequited first love: it’s a one-person opera performed in the echo chamber of your own skull.

⁹ If you haven’t, you will. If you have, and you’re pretending you haven’t, please know that I see you and I forgive you.

¹⁰ Or maybe Roland Barthes. Or your friend’s freshman-year roommate who wore scarves and said things like “I’m interested in the intersection of liminality and hermeneutics.” Provided he was French. Or au moins a francophile.

“FOOTNOTES ON FOOTNOTES”

It is possible — likely, even — that everything I just said about Eliza (cf. Section II) is wrong.¹

Not wrong in the factual sense. The facts are largely incontrovertible: yes, there was an Eliza (not her real name), yes, there was a shared science project, yes, I spent three weeks believing her half-smile during roll call was a message meant solely for me. But facts, as any sophomore lit major high on The Unbearable Lightness of Being will tell you, do not constitute truth.² And the truth is: I’ve revised the story so many times, even I no longer know if I loved her, or if I just loved the version of myself who was capable of loving her. It’s like looking at old photos of your grandparents and not knowing whether you really remember being with them at the time the photo was taken or simply having seen it so often that you think you were.

In fact, hold on, let’s do a Footnote Audit.

Footnote ¹ (from above): “Everything I just said about Eliza ... is wrong.”

See also: every memory you have of middle school. They are all wrong, because you were not a reliable narrator. You were a hormonal jellyfish in a Jimi Hendrix Experience T-shirt. Your brain was not yet fully developed. You believed Brut Body Spray made you “mysterious.” Let us recalibrate expectations accordingly.

Which brings us to an important, soul-puckering question: Is the memory of first love more about nostalgia for innocence than for the actual person?

Because let’s be honest: the person you loved probably enjoyed drinking Tang and listened to the Monkees unironically. They did not understand your soul. They enjoyed playing Battling Tops (as did you, but you also had other uses for supple wrist action). They once said their favourite book was Valley of the Dolls. (Which reminds me for some reason of the time Johnny Carson asked Jacqueline Susann if she’d like to meet Philip Roth, not long after the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, and she said yes but only if she didn’t have to shake his hand. Which was way better than anything she ever wrote.)

And yet, to return to first love, the topic (at hand) here ... You felt everything.

Which leads us to:

∞. A Recursive Digression About the Nature of Romantic Memory That May Have No Exit

Let’s define memory not as a record, but as a performance — a repeatedly improvised monologue in which you, the protagonist, are always slightly more sympathetic than you probably were.³ First love, then, becomes a kind of emotional myth-making, a place where we go not to remember them, but to remember who we were before disappointment became structural. (This would sound deeper in French. Donc, répétez après moi: avant que la déception ne devienne structurelle. Et maintenant make a saucy moue comme Brigitte Bardot to convey annoyance or distaste.)

Bottom line (ligne sur vos fesses): There’s a certain kind of adolescent hope that is chemically impossible to regenerate in adulthood. Not because we lose the capacity to love, but because we gain the ability to forecast disaster.⁴

Which is probably good for survival. But terrible for modern poetry. Quel honte!

And now — because the essay has looped back on itself like a Möbius strip made of journal entries and Dashboard Confessional lyrics — you, the reader, might be asking:

“Wait — so did you even love Eliza, or was she just a projection?”

To which I say:

Oui.

And also:

Non.

And finally:

God, who even knows anymore? Maybe we were 22 and shared a house with some other students in our university days and my room was next to hers and on weekends, when her boyfriend was in town, I could hear them making love in the next room and I’m not saying that this is true either, but it is an immutable fact that I took a lot of cold showers that unbearably sultry summer, which was also the Summer of Sam in New York City (but that’s just a coincidence), and then one night as I was dropping off to sleep my door opened and I could see her halo as she hesitated and then she closed the door and lay down beside me and I just lay there like an shivering idiot and after what seemed like an eternity she started to kiss me and I started to salivate like a loose-jowled mastiff and maybe I’m just messing with you and maybe none of this happened either except maybe the saliva part.

ADDENDUM: A Footnote That Eats Itself

Let’s consider this footnote:

⁵ “I did not [have gum]. I lied and said I had gum but had ‘just run out,’ which remains one of the most pathetic attempts at flirtation in recorded history.”

Which leads us to:

⁵a This is technically not true. The most pathetic attempt at flirtation in recorded history happened in 1967, the Summer of Love (also a coincidence), when a girl named Rhonda (she’ll almost certainly never see this so, yes, her real name) who also had hair sent a friend to ask me whether I liked her and even though I did a little bit I was trying to be cool and coolly replied “not particularly” and that was the end of my chance of romance with Rhonda (who, parenthetically, detested that Help Me song by the Beach Boys as does every girl or woman ever named Rhonda).

Which leads us to:

⁵b Which proves that love, when first attempted, is always a little bit embarrassing. And that’s why we never quite get over it. Not because we want it back. But because part of us still wants to believe that someone, somewhere, could send a friend to ask if we like them and we could say yes so we could feel their breasts all perfume yes and our hearts were going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (Chance of this ever occurring in this lifetime: the square root of zero).

FINAL THOUGHT, MAYBE:

What I’m saying — poorly, and with a frankly alarming number of typographic flourishes — is that first love is not a person, it’s a time machine.

It’s a portal to the moment you first learned your heart had volume.

And whether it was Eliza or Jordan or Sam from Theatre Camp who smelled like vanilla and destiny, you carry them. Not because they were the one. But because you were you, completely, for the first time — and maybe the only time — before love became something you needed a manual to survive.

And that, I think, is worth remembering.

Even if the gum was a lie. Moral: Always carry a wad or two of HUBBA BUBBA.