So where was I? Oh yes, I fell in love, for the first time in my life..

He was a year below me, and we met when I was assigned to take care of his class as a student councillor. It started serendipitously. He was one of few boys and girls I got on with, so we hung out. Talking to him was easy, and fun. There was this energy in the air when we interacted, an energy I didn’t get with anyone else. An energy that felt like electricity at times. We got each other’s jokes, jokes only both of us seemed to find funny. I often wonder though which is the chicken and which the egg – a common sense of humour precedes attraction, or you simply find the jokes of your object of affection funnier? Anyway, jokes soon turned into banter. And banter became laced with tenderness. Time shrank when I spent it with him – hours felt like minutes, and were never quite enough. As I tried to make sense of the longing I felt when I didn’t see him, and the palpitations I got when I did see him, it eventually dawned on me. I was falling in love…

How I love that phrase. You don’t walk to love, nor do you climb up to love, you fall into it. As accidents go, it cannot get more beautiful, no?

After three months, he was transferred to another junior college, one preferred by his mum. I thought, perhaps that was it. We had to end before we even began. A couple of weeks later however, he came back. Against his mum’s wishes. For me, to be with me. And thus he was to be my first ever love.

It was an exhilarating journey of discovering, and being discovered. Of learning how to love a human being whom you have no duty to love, and to trust a person you have no reason to trust. Of realizing that the prize of being understood by another in this galaxy is the price of opening yourself up to hurt by one. Of accepting that for two souls to come together, a part of the two selves has to be left behind.

I learnt these as I moved along, but I didn’t learn them fast enough, or well enough. I can no longer remember the exact trigger now, but just before I took my “A” levels, we broke up. And so in the same year, I experienced my first heartbreak. I didn’t know it could be so painful.

Preparing for a major exam whilst dealing with that constant wrench in your heart, and missing terribly the person you have spent almost every day in the last ten months with, and still see around the school, I can tell you, is no fun. I managed somehow to pull myself together, sat the exams and topped my stream, as the second ten of my life drew slowly to a close, and Oxford beckoned.

I haven’t seen him in years. As I write this, I wonder how he is, if he would be annoyed that I wrote about us (see what I do to satisfy your curiosity!), and whether he would have the same recollection as I do of us in those ten intense and beautiful months. First loves are what they are, imbued perhaps with a disproportionate significance. I will always remember mine with fondness [to be continued…].

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