First Love Lost

A Story by Courtney Rose

i dont know how i came up with this..these stories just pop up =]

When I was a senior in high school I fell in love for the first time--truly, madly, deeply in love--with a boy named Chris. We met in Florida on Captiva Island where we were both spending our spring break. I was there with three friends from my hometown in the Midwest, and he was there with three friends from his hometown on the East Coast. Here's how we met:

My friend Denise was driving us to this restaurant called "The Mucky Duck." You had to drive really slow through the resort--like 25 mph--and stop every few feet at a stubby little stop sign. We pulled up to one of these stop signs in our big white rental van and there were these four boys waiting for a shuttle bus. My friend Beth rolled down the window and told them to get in. The side door of the van slide open and my eyes fell immediately on the red-headed boy among them.

It was like a cliche--I stopped seeing everyone else around me; I didn't even look to see if the other boys were cute; I just locked eyes with this boy and I swear I fell right in love and never stopped. We spent that night talking, and the rest of the trip walking on the beach and kissing and giving each other little mementos--

his Madras plaid wallet (he was preppy), my class ring (if you're out there Chris, my mom wants you to give it back). Then, we went back to our cold winter worlds, thousands of miles apart. We talked on the phone and wrote each other letters all the time--we didn't have email or IM, so we had to wait for snail mail. Chris was a great writer so his letters were sort of like poems. He used words I'd never heard before--like "myriad" to describe all the red taillights of the cars on the highway. He loved REM, so we would listen to them on the phone and try to figure out the lyrics, which was NOT easy. He loved F. Scott Fitzgerald, so I read everything Fitzgerald ever wrote. But mostly I just pined away for Chris..

A few months later I graduated from high school and Chris finished his junior year (yep, he was a younger man). We bought plane tickets to visit each other. Chris came to see me first. My parents loved him and I loved him. We laughed at my dad because Greek was his native language, so he would say "cone of ice cream" instead of "ice-cream cone," and he would stop at yellow lights because he thought they were red. It was the only heaven I'd ever known.

Later that summer, I visited Chris in Boston. To pay for my plane ticket, I saved every penny I had from babysitting and teaching aerobics. But I also sold some gold jewelry and borrowed money from an ex-boyfriend (charming, I know). Chris picked me up from the airport in a green station wagon. We hung around his parents' big Victorian house and ate his mom's food. One day we drove to his family's beach house for the day. That afternoon, he lost his virginity to me on a boat adrift in Duxbury Bay. (I wished I had my virginity to give to him.) We went back to his house and held each other until we just had to go back to Boston. A few days later I went home. And then, I went to college.

I was there for a month before I had a chance to visit Chris again. I drove from New York to Boston to see him. It was normally a three-hour trip, but I left in the middle of a hurricane so it took longer. There were power lines and trees down across the highway. I left my wallet on top of a phone at a rest stop. All this just made me want to be with him more. And yet, I was afraid to see him. Because I had fooled around with another boy a few times. It was silly really--I didn't care about the other boy the same way I cared about Chris. It was almost out of boredom that I kissed the other boy. We were really just friends. All the excuses went through my head. But I felt like I needed to tell Chris. I couldn't just act like nothing had happened. Lying didn't have a place in our relationship. Not when we had been so honest with each other, so bare with our souls.

The electricity was out in Boston that night so we went to a party that was lit by candlelight. It was so romantic. I simply couldn't tell him there. So I waited until the next day when we went to see the new house his family planned to move into in a few weeks.

We lay on the floor next to a rolled up carpet--there was no furniture there yet--and I told him that I had to tell him something. Then I just said it, as fast as I could, as straight-forward as I could: "I slept with someone at school. But it doesn't mean anything." But it did mean something to Chris. It meant that he cried. And that he didn't want to touch me anymore. He couldn't understand and neither could I, how I could have broken his heart when I loved him so much. But I did. And he could not forgive me. Then, or ever. It was as if all the openness between us, all the trust and the faith, all the vulnerability was gone. I don't think I would have told him if I'd known that he wouldn't love me anymore. Even though I know now that things would not have been the same, and that they weren't the same from the minute I talked to him on the phone for the first time after I had been with the other boy.

Chris and I saw each other once or twice after that, but he was cold and I was guilty. Things were so awkward between us that it felt better not to speak. And so slowly we stopped calling each other. A few years after our day at the beach, I didn't even know how to contact him. His parents had divorced and moved. Then he graduated from college and disappeared into the big wide world.

Over the years I've tried to Google him. I've tried looking for him on his college website. I've asked everyone I know who is from Boston if they knew him. But nothing. To this day, I have no idea where he is. Occasionally I'll remember something he said about his sister or his father and I'll try to Google them. But nothing.

Since then, my heart has been broken by people who cheated on me, but claimed to love me. And it makes me want to call him and tell him how I feel. How sorry I am that I wrecked our romantic dream because I forgot, for a minute, how important it is to love openly and innocently. And I forgot--no, didn't even realize--how special what we had was. It may not have lasted--we were young and growing apart--but I'll never know. And I'll never have another first love. And neither will he.

THE END