First Love; ancient history.
“Let me tell you about my first love”. It was the sentence I had been waiting for, for a while. Wondering when my mother would confide in me, like the friend I was now becoming. Those careful phrases like “you need some time” and “you’re still so young” had now been exhausted. Her last remedy for my broken heart would be her own survivor’s tale.
But I just wanted to hide myself in my own memories - even though that girl, the old me, at the beginning looked so alien now. She was littler than me, with deeper eyes and browner hair and blank skin. I pictured her sitting, crossed legged, on the porch where they had first been introduced. A friend had invited everyone for brunch to eat the leftovers from his cousins wedding; old couscous, cold lobster and strawberries. It wasn’t their morning after, but she felt like it could have been. She was afraid to look at him. She felt unprepared, as he gazed into her. She felt very seventeen.
She remembered how her parents were gone all week even during the summer and arrived at the beach house late in the evenings to empty rooms, their children had already left. By now they would have found all the other brothers and sisters and be riding their bicycles around Noank or sitting on the grass planning their evening. They decided to make a fire tonight, wedged between the seaweed so it crackled loud enough to stir the ocean. They forgot that none of them were children anymore or that when September came she would be starting university. But the summers were like lazy afternoons where time slows down and melts the last year away.
He knew she’d be at the beach this summer. She stayed there every year. He knew that this summer would be their last. And he knew that whilst he sat there amongst the laughter of the others, prompted by the stale beer they had found in someone’s garage, and even with the girls they had asked to join them circling, that he would only see her. He welcomed the darkness, so that the fire they had built would light up her face in that way he always thought of her by. The shadows that stuck to her, her eyes, which were like pools of silver, and her crooked smile that let him know that she knew.
They were only alone when everyone else had gone. When they fell behind the rest of them on their walk home and drifted closer together. They dropped underneath the orange of a streetlight and leant into each other for their clumsy, but perfect first kiss.
She clung to those first words knowing he’d never said them to anyone else. They stayed locked in her head where no one could see them, or change them. But where they could twist and flip as if they were being spoken again. She tried to read something else other than their messages to each other, hoping to find the safety of an ending, but the pages soon became adorned with her own thoughts.
It was strange to find that his words stuck to me now in much the same way. His final words, the ones that he had meant to say goodbye. Their resting place was in that cold flat in Camden. With white walls and hand stains, and the sour lights that lit up the paper and shoes and things folding around the doors. They had built themselves into their own mess. The only sound was the passive whur of my laptop, which was balanced on my knees. I remembered the figures in bed, which had become like mush. Lying there all weekend, motionless like jellies. They had lost their sting, and instead possessed a deadly ease with one another. They had misplaced it somewhere, or perhaps between each embrace it had been squeezed out.
Was this it? There had to be more than this. They didn’t feel twenty-one. They didn’t feel young. The bed had turned into their burial ground, the site of their eulogy. He managed to turn and whispered, “You’re my best friend” because that was all that remained. And she nodded in accordance, as the tears slid down her cheeks and sunk into the pillows.
I grimaced at this recollection, the final cordial exchange. It had all become so plain. Instead I wanted to picture cruelness, a smash, a howl. I wanted to be able to hate him. Hate him to hide the ache of the sluggish truth: we just didn’t love each other enough to promise everything now.
It was only a first love.
My mother’s sudden change in tone interrupted this thought and directed me back to her story. “I mean it wasn’t that kind of relationship,” she said, catching herself, cautious in this vulnerable moment. “I saw him last year I think, and let myself wonder for a minute. But then I realise that it just wasn’t meant to be”.