Outside the box #5: My first love

[amul]

rosetiger: Tell me about your first love or the person you THOUGHT was your first love.

Love is a strange word in my mouth these days. I thought I knew what love was when I was fourteen, thought it should be epic and awe-inspiring, overwhelming and all-embracing. I thought love meant that you'd be willing to ride out and slay dragons in her name. Strange, then, that my first overwhelming need to connect with a particular person somehow managed to be epic and awe-inspiring, even though she never let me near the dragon.

That first love of mine, who was so many firsts of mine, who was so few firsts of mine, taught me that love wasn't about riding out to face anything. She needed me to keep my home-fire burning, needed me to be a blazing inferno kept so distantly from her that I was little more than a candle in the dark.


She was, she is, she will always be my Priceless Pearl, a hard shell of beauty that grows inside a claustrophobic accumulation of decay and grime. She was my most wretched failure, and 18 years later, in some ways she is my greatest triumph. Failure, because I never actually got to be with her, never was allowed to exult openly in the titanic storm of my feelings for her. Yet, we are still friends all these years later, and the teetering rockiness of the decade when I wanted her above all other things has finally passed. PPearl and I are out the other side of that storm, and both of us are stronger (and, I hope, happier) for it.

Because my love for her had been unrequited, at least in the most base of standards, because it caused us so many problems, both between us and in our other relationships, it is hard for me to go back to the place where my emotions for her were so overwhelming. It is hard to write about how much I once treasured how I felt about her, because of how deeply I treasure how we feel about each other today.

When words between My Ex and I grew so bitter and cutting that my sanity was in peril, I kept PPearl in my ear, to soothe and guide me through those fights. In some ways that made the fights even worse, because My Ex never believed that I had stopped loving PPearl, and I'm sure she must have harbored deep resentment over PPearl's presence during those fights. In fact, when I first told My Ex that I wanted an end to our relationship, her first words were, "She's never going to have you, you know." It took me a few minutes to realize who she was talking about, and I realized then things which I had never consciously known.

How can I encapsulate ten years of reckless devotion in a single entry, especially when my feelings were so intense that they attached monumental importance to every word that went unspoken between us? Can I convey it properly without sharing the tragedies which we both pretend never happened? There were poorly timed words and badly judged actions which are crucial to the understanding of what went between us, but the most important part of those offenses is that we each learned to forgive the other, and so learned to accept the imperfections of the world around us.

Then too, there are stories which we tell every time someone is luckless enough to spend time with us both, which we've laughed over so often that we recite the tales like a performance. So much of my habit of storytelling comes from this relationship, because every second of my teenage life was measured against the standard of "Is This Worth Telling Her?" In the back of my head, a part of me was reciting every conversation, every activity, trying to figure out how to convey this moment to her so that she might feel like she was there.

Tangent: PPearl just called. I told her what I was writing, and she said, "You can answer that in a single sentence, you know. There's no need to wax poetic." But I like to wax poetic!

Alright, fine, I'll keep it short. My first love? She was, and is, my dearest friend, and you should meet her, 'cuz she's super awesome. Her LJ is princessmatilda.

Comments

[rosetiger.livejournal.com]

You write so well, which is why I wanted you to write about this. Remember the night I sat up with way too much wine and read a ton of your posts about another lady?

[amul.livejournal.com]

Of course I remember, I only forget things like "where I put my keys" or "who I'm supposed to hang out with tomorrow."

I need to call Roo. I haven't talked to her in months.