Remember Me?

When it’s your first love, you can’t help but think of the rest of your lives together. Your emotional baggage is that of, maybe, a small clutch, and your views of reality are mostly untainted by loss, and the other woman, and falling out of love. When it’s your first love you have no choice but to think of your future because that’s the only love that you’ve ever known.

“Why are you going?” my best friend asked, applying mascara in her bedroom mirror.

“For David, obviously,” I said.

“You know he got back together with Amanda, right?”

I didn’t. For a moment I was speechless. Too many emotions swirling around to make sense of a single one. “Oh. No, I didn’t. She blocked me on Facebook so…”

“I’m so sorry, I thought you knew,” Taylor said, unsure of how to console me.

“Oh well, I have other friends graduating, too.” I didn’t cry in that moment. It didn’t feel real.

We had only just broken up, and I always knew deep down that it was because of her. When he didn’t tell me that she had been staying at his for a few days to visit his sister. When he started the talk on the premise of ‘we don’t argue enough anymore’ and ‘you never let me pay for you’. It was superficial, and I would have ended up hating him a lot less if he had just told me the truth: it was always meant to be Amanda.

But it wasn’t her that was the other woman, it was me. I was the one who swooped in and stole someone else’s guy. It wasn’t on purpose, and no lines were crossed while they were together. I was too naive to know, at only 15, that even the possibility of something new was enough to make a boy forget the girl he was with. I had just wanted a friend, and in the end I ended up with my heart torn out of my body and left there without a care.

I was angry because he had lied. We had planned, just days before, to have one last day together. One day, after school was over, before he went to college, to spend just the two of us. One last day for closure.

He lied to her about me. He lied to me about her. And he lied to me that everything was going to be okay.

Ever since that day, I forced our relationship out of my head. Convinced myself that it was short-lived, and that it was never really meant to be for me anyway. It was always meant to be for her. And for a while it worked. Just like he was so good at lying to us and hiding behind the “I never meant to hurt you” line, I was good at lying to myself and hiding behind the “It didn’t mean anything to me” line.

But it did mean a lot to me. It meant everything to me. For years I was left comparing everything to my time with him.

“I hate my elbows,” I said to David, both of us sitting on the floor of my room.

“Why?”

“Because they’re all saggy and gross. I can’t even walk down the hallway with my arms at my side without freaking out.”

“Well I love them.” He said, grabbing my arm and gently running his fingers across my elbow.

“Why?” I said, scrunching up my nose and laughing uncomfortably. “That’s so strange.”

“Because they’re a part of you.” He leaned forward to kiss me and touched my face with his thumb.

It was moments like these that failed to escape my memory. Nothing significant, something that no one else would find particularly moving. But the way they made me feel made them the most important of all. David taught me that unconditional love was possible. He taught me that someone was capable of finding beauty in all my flaws. He gave me a better taste in music. He gave me hope, that up until now had all but left me, from living through not only one, but two life-crushing divorces between my parents. He even gave me the words I would later use to describe my sexuality: “I feel like you fall in love with a person, not their gender”.

But it’s not what I’ve lost that hurts the most. It’s not even what I’ve gained, knowing the person who gave me those things can’t be that generous with me anymore. It’s that I still have moments where the memories of him flash before my eyes, and he never thinks of me at all.

The only thing worse than being thought of negatively, is not being thought of at all.

Taylor’s name popped up on my phone. I opened her message, unsuspecting, as she was still my best friend all these years later.

Taylor: David and Amanda are engaged…

Me: Why are you telling me this?

T: I just thought you’d want to know

M: That’s not surprising at all, it was only a matter of time!

T: Are you sad?

M: No, I’m happy for them!

It seemed Taylor guessed before I even knew, how it might feel watching your first love marry someone else. I was dismissive and nonchalant because I thought it didn’t matter. I wasn’t in love with him anymore, I rarely even thought of him. It had been so long.

But over time I would lay awake at night thinking the same thing that everyone said when it came up in conversation: that it could have been me.

I thought about what it would have been like if I let myself be myself around his family, how close we would have gotten over the years. I thought of how I would pick out a big, white dress. I thought of asking his sister to be my bridesmaid, and his best friends’ girlfriends helping me get ready for my bachelorette party. But that was a future that was never meant to be mine. It was always hers.

He was always hers.

I watched them get married over social media, scrolling through our mutual friends’ pictures, convincing myself that I was happy for them. And I really am happy that he’s happy. That they found in each other everything that I’ve been searching for, everything that we’re all searching for. But you can be happy for someone else and still be unhappy with yourself.

I struggled for years asking myself why I wasn’t good enough, why he chose her over me. But I never realized that it wasn’t because I wasn’t good enough. See, he was my first love, but I wasn’t his.

“Is there any other Portland gossip I’ve missed out on?” An old high school friend I recently reconnected with asked me one night over the phone.

“David and Amanda got married…” I said quietly.

“I always forget that you two dated.”

“I mean, yeah, he probably did, too,” I said forcing a laugh.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not really. Not in the sense that I still want to be with him. More like--”

“Like it could’ve been you,” He finished.

“Exactly. Like, my life could have been so much different if we had never broken up.”

“But different doesn’t always mean better.”

“Right. Different doesn’t always mean better,” I echoed, although at the time I thought that in a way, maybe, different was better. Simpler at least. Less painful.

The last time I saw him, was at a party my senior year of high school. He had been away at college the past few years, and I awkwardly tried to enjoy time with my friends, while always keeping him in the corner of my eye. I climbed into the back seat of some guy’s truck to smoke with two other people. It was pitch black, and I was laughing at us stumbling over each other from the lack of sight.

“Who is that?” I said switching on the overhead light.

“Just me,” David answered with his goofy smile.

I smiled back, turned off the light, and silently shared the blunt between us.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” another guy said to me. I shrugged. I got out of the truck and went on with my friends, slightly more defeated than before.

I never wanted to feel like that again. Like someone’s second choice. I knew I didn’t want to be with him anymore--our love wasn’t any more special than anyone else’s. But thinking of him still reminded me that I wasn’t enough. Thinking of him reminded me of the pain that I felt knowing that I wasn’t even worth the text to tell me that they were back together. Thinking of him reminded me of how easy it was for him to tell me we could spend one last day together, while simultaneously telling another girl that he loved her.

“That’s my ex boyfriend,” I said to a group of my students at the high school, pointing at a picture still hanging on a bulletin board.

“Miss, you dated him?” One of the girls I was teaching said, giggling in disapproval.

“Yup. And that’s the girl he left me for.”

“Oh my God, you are SO much prettier than her!” They lied, as young girls often do to make you feel better. And it did, actually.

It’s strange processing my adolescent emotions at 23, but I guess that’s the point. There’s never really an ending to any of my stories. I’m just a continuation of the person that I was eight years ago, hopefully with a little more wisdom and a little less self-doubt. Always learning, always processing, always changing, always progressing.

It still hurt all those years later, past the time everyone forgot that I would be hurting. People move on from your pain and expect you to move on with them. But we never really do. We keep it with us, and convince everyone around us that we’re happy because they’re tired of hearing about you being sad over the same thing.

“I miss you!” I wrote to Taylor, not telling her why.

“I miss you too hunni bunz,” she wrote back. She was so patient with me and my plethora of relationship problems, and she never got tired of hearing it. She understood my pain when I didn’t have the words to describe it.

Your first love is rarely your last love, but it sticks with you just the same. David and Amanda will share that forever, and go on not ever thinking of me. And finally, after all this time, I can go on not ever thinking of them.