First Light

You first love isn’t your first boyfriend. It isn’t the man who kisses you and drops you off by ten. It isn’t the boy you hope will take you to prom. It isn’t even the one who waits at the end of the aisle in a little white church.

When you’re a girl, you first love is your father. The man who waits for you, hoping and praying for your two eyes, one beating heart, your ten fingers and your ten toes. The man who watches and cheers for your first steps, teaches you how to ride a bike, and holds you when you cry. You’re born with these needs, but never the expectations. From the moment he holds you in his arms, you’re his. You don’t remember that first light and you don’t remember the first time he held you, but you carry that with you forever…if it indeed happened that way.

I fell in love for the first time – or so I thought –when I was fourteen. He was two years older and that was awesome to me. He kissed me and held my hand, drove me places and we went to movies and looked at stars. Everything you might have hoped for. We stayed in love at an arm’s length. In the four years we were together, we laughed, cried, worked and studied. Not once did he step foot in my house, nor I in his. He never met my mom, we never went to family dinners. We set our eyes on the future and, after fighting tooth and nail, were finally facing it on the vast expanse of open road.

Eighteen years old, and I’m ready for anything – I know how to cook, clean, sew and write. I also know CPR, how to get an overdosed woman to the hospital and how to cook heroin. Not for me, though.

I could see everything set out before me – a happy marriage, college, a job at a shitty diner, and getting home to my shitty apartment with him. Troy was my rock and I would do whatever it took to stick with him and support his career. He is on track to become a pilot – hopefully with one of the big airlines. From there we will travel the world together and all those days and nights I dreamed, seemingly in vain of my future will be in the past. Those dreams would be my present. He is so determined, intelligent and wise beyond his years.

I was not. Maybe that’s why I didn’t see it coming when he left for good. A trip to Europe without a buddy pass left me at home neurotically cleaning the apartment (which wasn’t as shitty as my dreams.) and watching the clock. I baked a cake and made dinner. I waited. I nibbled on the cake and picked at dinner. I waited. I wrapped dinner up. I paced the kitchen. I paced the living room. I lay in bed. I tossed and turned. I fell asleep.

I woke to the sound of a key in the lock. I sprang up and there was Troy, tall, tan and sober, sauntering in and dropping his bags in the living room. I jumped up and kissed him and was met by tight lips and stiff arms. I didn’t care. Everything in that moment was perfect to me. I dragged him to bed and stripped off all his clothes. He was a fleshy robot as he made love to me, barely making eye contact and kissing me even less. By the time it was over, I felt little relief or satisfaction. Rather, a hollowness. I held his hand and traced the lines on his palm with my fingertips.

“How was Europe?” I whispered, oddly in suspense, for some unknown reason.

“Temporary,” he said.

“Temporary?”

He leaned over the bed to retrieve something from his pants on the floor. A lighter and a pack of cigarettes. He lit one and I froze. He had never smoked a day in his life.

“Everything is,” he said, puffing smoke into the air.

Something about this act broke my heart. He saw my eyes grow misty. I waited for him to cup my face and hold me to his chest. Instead, he took another drag off the cigarette and put it out directly on the nightstand. My concern must have been pretty obvious by then, as he deliberately turned away from me and lay on his side.

“Goodnight?” I questioned. It truly was a question. It was met by silence.

I slowly wrapped my arms around his waist and he stiffened at my touch. He did not move away, but his hands rested in front of him awkwardly. Despite all uneasiness, we drifted into separate dream worlds.

The next few weeks, we were merely a shadow of what we once were. There was an absence of words, a hollowness to our kisses and a dishonesty to our touch. It was a cycle of silent meals, study, work and sex. The sex began robotically but evolved into a new kind of passion, though not the sort I had hoped. It became a need that could not be filled. It transformed from a lack of desire to a desperation for the right kind of intimacy. Finding none, we faded quickly. Gone were the days of certainty, replaced by an empty shell that housed us both – the apartment we had dreamed of became the chains that held us together…until finally, he found the key.

He packed his bags and set off to become the man he couldn’t be with me. Free. Selfish. Uncaring. I can’t say he didn’t deserve it. No, he had given of himself all the time we had planned to elope and spend our lives together. Everyone deserves to be free. What hurt was knowing I was his prison. So I let him go.

I cried, I screamed and I begged for the pain in my heart to cease – but not on the day he left. When he walked out the door I stood, somber and still as he stepped out of my life.

A shitty diner here, a coffee shop there. I got by. It was modestly happy, but like most things we achieve, meant little alone. I strove to purge him from my mind. I thought a lot about first loves. I thought a lot about what other people did to fulfill themselves. People who weren’t running from what was inside them. People who lived in the present, moving toward the future, without looking paranoidly over their shoulders at the past. I was bound together, strung along with my past, present, and future.

I packed my present into the car and drove away from the apartment, hoping that was all from my past. My car was pointed toward what I thought would be my future. Little did I know how small the world truly is, and that it doesn’t take long to end up right back where you started.