I reconnected with my first love recently, 7 years after the end of our relationship and 4 years after the last time I saw him. In between those timelines and lifetimes, I often thought of him as the only one I’d ever love like that. The only soul tie I had ever created. I have loved and been loved since him in those timelines and lifetimes and I believed I had proven myself wrong a few times but the end never felt the way it did when he left. He was the first person to show my young jaded heart that love was real, even when it ended. I remember the rant I gave my mother at the dinner table with tear filled eyes. I was 16 experiencing my first heartbreak and no feeling I had ever experienced had ever felt that real. I spoke highly of him still, through my shattered heart and swollen eyes, tears still racing down my cheeks and eyes that have gotten no sleep. I spoke of gratitude; how grateful I was to love like that, to be loved like that. To feel so deeply and connect to someone in such a way at such a young age.
“The pain was worth it!” I kept repeating, sobbing. “I would go back and only love him harder despite knowing the inevitable end! I would only love him harder and hold him tighter!”
My mother looked over at her 16 year old daughter, crying with gratitude over a broken heart and replied “you are so beautiful.” She herself experienced heartbreak, the end of a marriage just the year before mine and was still in the painful grief process. She was the first of the family to experience heartbreak, a lost love, and I was second. The eldest daughter out of three kids, the middle child and yet I have fallen in and out of love more times than anyone else in my family. They watch my tireless attempts at finding that feeling again like I am a creature at a zoo, dumbfounded at my fearlessness of getting my heart broken again.
He sat across from me for the first time in 4 years and I started to mentally count and compare all the differences I’d notice from the man in front of me to the boy that used to lie in my arms and live in my heart. He has a beard now and I notice chest hair peeking out from the top of his t-shirt. His hair is much shorter and seems darker, still messy but nothing like the shoulder length light blond hair I used to intertwine my fingers in. His smile was the same, his mannerisms too; like the way he uses his hands to talk when he's being lighthearted and playful. He spoke more confidently now, aware and comfortable in his skin. His body resembles more of a man than a lanky young boy which caught me off guard a bit. His eyes haven't changed either and the feeling of his stare has the same effect after all this time.
He told me about his life, his journey through grief and suffering. How he's been committed to healing everything that he avoided in his youth. He can finally cry now, the pressure he used to feel in his face is no longer there. He wears a big tiger's eye crystal around his neck and smiles wider now. His laugh is more full body like he's accepted joy into his life like never before. I had to hold back tears when I noticed all of the similarities and differences I found.
I felt the disconnect from the present, and a simultaneous hyper awareness of all the lives I lived in his absence. This feeling rushed through my veins, like the caffeine from a double shot of espresso or the head rush that follows a sober cigarette. He says “You look the same, but your energy is more you; calmer.” I told him about my life the past 4 years and although I experienced traveling and life in many ways; the common pattern is my habit of getting in and out of relationships. My heart has broken about 5 times since the end of our relationship, in the past 7 years. The men I’ve dated become no more than a stranger to me after a year. How devoted I am to loving even though I was rarely loved back in the same capacity is confusing to him.
“Do you believe you deserve love?” He asked me.
“Are you afraid of being alone?”
I lingered on that thought. Embarrassed. When was the last time I was single? Alone with nowhere to put my love other than myself and my world? I had just moved into my first apartment with my current boyfriend. He's gentle, treats me well and loves me so much. The healthiest relationship I’ve ever experienced in my adulthood. But I can’t help but think we've only been dating for 6 months and not even a month before I met him I was in Greece with a completely different lover. I didn’t choose the city we moved to, he did and I was okay with it. I didn’t plan anything about Greece, he did but I was okay with it. These men that court me plan futures with me in their heads and I fear I just simply play the part... Do I allow myself any say in these futures? Or am I just okay with it? Is the concept of falling and staying in love more important to me than my own journey to find myself? Healing myself? The spiritual path I have always been drawn to but always ignored because the people I allowed myself to love never took that part of me seriously, never mind joining me on the same path.
