They say that you never forget your first love. Perhaps it is because your heart is pure, whole, and unbroken. It is the one time in your life that you are capable of loving someone with all of it, that you can give it away in its entirety, that it bears no scars or sores or half-mended wounds. You are naïve enough to believe in forever, foolish enough to place your trust in his good intentions and your best laid plans. You are innocent.
And then, your heart gets broken. And when you grieve, you weep not only for the loss of that person, but also for the loss of the person that you used to be. For when your heart breaks, you never fully recover. Gone are the youthful fantasies, the easy trust, your belief in forever. You learn to build a wall around your heart, to only give the next man a small corner of it. You learn to be hard and wary and to rely on yourself.
And so the only person that you've ever truly given yourself to is the first.
You move on… you'll always move on. You vow to forget him and brush away your tears, and lock his memory away in a corner of your scarred, bruised, battered heart. You soldier forward, find someone new; you fall in love again.
But then you hear his name… as I heard his name… and that memory rattles against its chains. And when you have the misfortune to bump into him, as I chanced to stumble across him, with your lover's arm around your waist, that corner of your heart screams and cries and weeps when he introduces you to the slim, pale girl beside him. He introduces you as his old friend, and you smile and you shake her hand, but you meet her steely dark gaze and you know she knows, know that she feels your presence just as surely as your lover feels his.
And you wonder why life can't be fair, why love can't last forever, why hearts have to break.
And you wish that you could love the others as much as you still love the first.