Everything I Never Say ✓

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Infinity

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an epilogue-of-sorts

•First Love : a prose by Deborah Anne Barclay•

First loves are truly something. It doesn't matter how long it has been since we learnt to let go, doesn't matter if we've found someone else, doesn't matter if this someone else is the light of our life and we are so in love with them than we've ever been during all our years — there will always, always be a part of us, piece of our heart that comes back to our first love.

First loves aren't just first loves, are they? They're also that ever and ever love. Not a forever kind, but something along the lines of infinity nonetheless.

I know how this story ends, I've known it since the day I felt my heart skip a beat for him. I just forgot how it began—having lost bits and pieces to my subconsciousness. And it is nice, to have this story documented in something eternal as words.

I have stayed up late at night, questioning what it was about Daniel that kept tugging my heartstrings back to him, what it was that made me want to hold on and never let go—and I have come to a conclusion.

Or, at least, a series of conclusions. There are bits and pieces of so many theories and ideas. A cluster of thoughts; little stars of realisations connecting with each other and making up this constellation of undying light.

I guess, in a way, my first love—Daniel—is the only one who will truly have received all of me, every single raw and unblemished piece. That is something no future lover of mine can ever get, not really, not when I think deep about it. Those raw pieces hold an innocence I once carried in my heart, in my soul, in my eyes. The hope that I can spend my forever with my first love, the belief that he is the one and there can be no other, the faith that love only ever happens once in this life and it will last forever and ever. The blind trust in the fact that we only love once.

The thing is, we don't love just once. We can love a second, and a third. But we just never fall in love the same way again—that happens only once. And First Loves, they are always a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing. I will never fall for someone the way I fell for Daniel, true, but I will fall in love again. I know that.

Daniel didn't break my heart; he didn't rip away my faith in love. If anything, he taught me that love can set me free, if only I can be brave enough to let it all the way in.

A First Love holds our childhood, our youth, the tenderness of our heart before it learns bitter truths, the carefree light in our eyes before wearniess begins to accompany it. It holds all our first ideas about what love is supposed to be like—all the ideas that our First Love eventually proves wrong and tosses out of our hearts.

And that right there is the simple and most painful truth.

I will never love anyone as deeply, as irrevocably, and as intensely as I did my First Love, and neither will I feel as heart-wrenching a pain as my first heartbreak. So agonising, in fact, that I remember spending nearly every waking moment after acknowledging my feelings wondering why I ever fell in love at all.

There were times when my fists would clench from the pain and I'd want to pound it against the left half of my chest—but our hearts have been bruised enough, and if not for us, who else is going to take care of it? More so, where is the logic in punishing the heart for something way beyond its control?