First Loves and Other Ghosts

You never forget the first time you fall in love, even when you want to.

I am no exception.

I had just turned eighteen. We met in a Prodigy chat room for nerds who sat up on Friday nights and did that sort of thing. It was a time when Tinder, Match.com, and swiping to the right didn’t exist. I wasn’t afraid of the internet. No monsters were lurking around every corner. There were only people, desirous of a connection, longing to get out of their tiny lives for a moment.

In real life, we would have never met. He was from a section of the city that I never entered because I didn’t belong there. The brownstones, the old money, and the nouveau riche were decidedly outside of my circle. But I was smart and had something to say. To my surprise, he listened.

We talked until the night became morning and learned we were two souls cut from the same cloth. We exchanged phone numbers, email addresses, and if I had had a pager, he probably would have asked for that as well. He wished me a happy birthday and told me he was my birthday present.

And somehow twenty-two years later, it’s what I remember most about him. It was the idea that someone could be wrapped up in a bow and delivered by destiny to someone at a point in their lives when they needed someone, anyone to care.

He called me the next day, at the exact time he said he would. We talked until my grandmother picked up the phone and told me I had to get off. We never lapsed in conversation. It was as if two old friends separated by years had met again and decided to catch each other up on what life had brought them over the time they remained apart.

He wanted to hang out, but I was afraid. I had hung out with guys before but never anyone I liked. Plus, he was older than me by two years, already a college man, and more experienced at life in general than I could ever hope to be. I made excuses. I blamed work, and familial obligations until I finally got up the courage.

It was a summer day, three weeks before I would start college myself and he would return to school. I spent the entire morning trying to figure out what items in my wardrobe would make me look less like a kid and more like an adult. I decided I hated my entire selection of clothes at least five times before I finally gave up and just wore what I had picked out in the first place.

I boarded the train downtown, the pace of my heart racing drowned out the sounds of the subway. By the time I emerged from its smelly depths and into the heart of the city everything faded into the background, and all I could concentrate on was our impending meeting. I walked into Tower Records. The air conditioning was so strong that I immediately had goosebumps. I looked around for him, but I was never good at spotting a face in the crowd. People seem to all meld together and become one, all looking similar to me.

Everyone has a signature way of greeting someone. For some, it’s a hug or a kiss on both cheeks. He walked up behind me, knowing me immediately as I entered the store, put his hand on the small of my back, and said hello. I immediately melted into his hand. It was as if my body knew that he would hold me up, single-handedly if I fell. Something inside me knew that I no longer had to be strong, he was here, he would hold me up.

We wandered the store. His eyes never leaving me, watching my every mannerism, he studied me. I bought a CD, Dave Matthews since I was obsessed with the band at the time. He took me to a place that made my favorite food because he wanted to show me that he did listen when I rambled on into the night.

We spent the next three weeks either on the phone or in each other’s company for as much time as we could spare. We never discussed what would happen when we went back to school, it was understood.

Even though we were six hundred miles apart when I checked my email on the first day of school there was a message from him wanting to know all the details. We conversed by email and met in chat rooms because of the long-distance charges to talk on the phone for hours.

As the semester wore on the inevitable happened, the pull of school demands and everyday life made regular communication difficult. But it didn’t bother me. I still doodled his name with mine all through my Survey of European History. Even after we talked about the girls he would hang out with, I never felt jealous.

There was never a part of me that ever thought that in the end, we would not be together.

When we met up over the holiday break, it was as if no time had passed. The women he hung out with during school were all a fleeting memory. While I had guys, who were my friends, they all knew about him and most importantly knew that they could never hold the same place he did.

His spot in my heart, reserved the day he walked up behind me and put his hand on the small of my back. They were only distractions, ushered out of the room as soon as my computer chimed, “You’ve got mail.”

We went on like this for years, him dating around and me holding the door to my heart closed to anyone who tried to enter it. A few came close, but no matter how hard I tried to let them in, they weren’t him. They weren’t my birthday present, wrapped up by the gods of fate and gifted to me. On breaks, we did everything together. We did things that felt hedonistic like lying in bed all evening, naked, eating cheesesteaks, and watching Mystery Science Theater 3K. He was my person.

And then it all stopped.

We all have those moments in our lives that we’ll remember. Even when dementia sets in and our brains turn to mush these moments, like scar tissue, never seem to fade away. It was a dreary spring day, rainy and depressing. I was a year out of college working as an assistant. We always spent most of my days chatting online on Yahoo. By that point, we were still nine hours away from each other but in the opposite direction, south instead of west. He was getting another degree, and I was killing time.

I was leaning to the side of the escalator when his text came through. I remember exactly what my phone looked like at the time, in fact, it’s the only phone I can remember.

"I’ve met someone."

"That’s cool."

"I’m in love with her, she’s amazing."

I didn’t respond. Instead, I wound up missing my train and throwing my favorite umbrella at the passing car. I didn’t respond for days. Not to the emails that followed to check up on me. Not to the calls I ignored. I stopped caring about myself, my sense of worth, my wellbeing. I went through a series of men whose names I don’t even recall, and the faces seem to blur into one homogenous blob of getting over him.

But I didn’t get over him. I filled my life with poor substitutions for the thing I longed for most, to be understood. I even went so far as to get engaged to a man that I would never have given the time of day to now. I had daydreams of him coming to my rescue and stopping the wedding, finally declaring his undying love for me. We would become one of those couples that stayed married for forty-plus years, surrounded by kids and grandchildren. Whose names, of course, I had already picked out.

That didn’t happen. I ended the engagement myself, as his relationship ended with the woman he was so in love with. It started with emails, then chat sessions, and calls. He was back in my life again, and I could forgive him his lapse in judgment because, in the end, he came to his senses. It was as if nothing had changed.

But something had, I was no longer the same person, I was used. Damaged by the string of men that came after him.

I got up the courage to tell him how I felt on one of those late afternoon phone calls. I paced outside my apartment complex, the noise from the cicadas loud and undaunting. Like they were warning me, turn back, abort, you will regret what you are about to say for the rest of your life.

But I didn’t abort. I told him that I was in love with him. The words, pouring out of me like a broken faucet. He listened and then said, “I love you too.” He paused, and in that pause, I saw my entire life’s happiness play out before my eyes, and then he said, “As a friend.”

He knew he had broken me. He spent the next hour telling me all about how he was waiting for the right one and about lightning bolt love. He explained how we would never have that and that I should want that as well, that I should wait for nothing less. I’m sure he got off the phone feeling less like the jerk who had kept a woman dangling for a decade and more like the teacher who had completed his final lesson.

I learned a lot that day. I learned that love is not a fairy tale. I learned that soul mates don’t exist, and no one comes wrapped in a pretty bow from the god of fate.

I moved on with my life but not in the sense that my heart was open and ready to give to anyone else. I got married and had a family with a man that I was no more in love with than my dog. We were friends, we enjoyed each other’s company, and we're excellent co-parents, but lightning bolt love it wasn’t. To no one’s surprise, we divorced, both of us wanting to find at some point before we died that love that people sing about. The kind of love we knew existed because we saw it in the eyes of other people.

I wound up with a man who I dare to say I love. It was slow and easy at the start even though the maintenance of it at times is hard. The man I married is romantic in spite of the fact that he often says it’s lost on me. At times, he reminds me of my first love. The love I always thought got away but never really had to begin with.

There are moments in my life where I think of him. I do a quick Google search and see what comes up. Sometimes, I will peruse his social media in the hopes that he never quite got his happy ending or found his lightning bolt love. I wonder if he ever Facebook searches my name to see if I happened to make a picture public. I wonder if he follows my writing as a means of finding out what I’m up to. I wonder if every now and again he doesn’t stop and wonder, what if?

I used to feel guilty about my trolling, but I don’t anymore. Even if he reached out to me, even if I got the butterflies that I used to get at the mere mention of his name. I wouldn’t spare the time to catch up. I’m not the girl he knew, not anymore. The young woman he met who believed in love against all the odds and wrote our names together a thousand times no longer exists. But every so often I find myself pondering what might have happened if I could have captured lightning.