Life is complicated and time blurs the edges of memory. I had two first loves. I will start with my second first love because for a very long time I thought he was my only first love...only he wasn't. I was fourteen,full of ideas and determined. I had a crush, a huge crush on a very silent boy. It seems I always fell for the silent ones...the ones I could not quite reach verbally or emotionally. He was my first high school boyfriend. Our time together was brief but intense. I truly believed I would love him forever, that I had discovered my future and it was set and good. So many expectations, so much planning into adulthood left me very frightened. I made him promises I did not have the maturity to keep. All at once I just knew I had to let him go. I was not who I told him I was. I was not in forever love, and looking back the love I felt was founded more in fantasy than reality. It is easy to recreate someone into someone they are not when they live hours away. I felt horrible when I broke up with him, but it was not working. I had grown weary of living for the next time I could see him. Would it be in a month or two?

My first first love, was not romantic, but it was sweet and deep. A little boy had moved in next door. He had two older brothers I did not pay much attention to them. This boy, at the age of six, introduced himself and asked me, age four, if I would be his friend. I did not get out of my own backyard much because my brother and I stayed home with my mom while my dad worked. I didn't really have friend friends. I did have cousins though...lots of them, but I only saw them when I went to my Grandma's. So I was delighted that this next door neighbor boy with sparkling eyes and a slight lisp wanted to be my friend. When I started first grade, our mothers made us walk to and from school together. Our mothers told him he had to hold my hand when we crossed the street and he did. I always felt so safe with him. One day after a big rain, we took off our school shoes and splashed through the puddles all the way home. When he moved away, I was sad.

Two years later my mom and his mom reconnected and we went to the farm where they lived. My friend was back. We were older but it was like no time had passed. He had an easy friendly way about him. One year passed into another. He was quite popular with the girls. I did not feel jealous just annoyed because I thought he sounded stupid when he flirted and he flirted a lot. He was a bit too wild for me. We were beginning to travel further apart, and yet somehow that kinship we had always shared remained. The last time I saw him I was twenty and he was newly married. It felt so strange because we were no longer children and the relationship we shared was behind us. Our paths have not crossed since, but when I think of him it always makes me smile. There was no guilt in our parting, no promises broken, just time and distance. And unlike my second first love, my first first love was founded in reality and time spent together for years. I can still see his eyes dancing and I can still hear his voice. If anyone had asked me in first grade who I was going to marry, I would have said his name. If anyone had asked me at fourteen who I was going to marry I would have said his older brother’s name. Both remain precious to me because my second first love helped me grow up and my first first love grew upwith me.