My First Love

It says that you can’t forget the people you once loved.

Strictly speaking, I was my husband’s first love, but my first love was someone else. One truth in life is that you don’t know whom you would meet in your path and you can’t always control how you might react to a particular person in a given time and circumstance. There is neither a perfect nor the most efficient life design, or the living would lose its purpose. You would be lucky if you learn to make better choices after tasting all the bitterness and you would be the luckiest if you could run into someone in the end who held you dearest and best suit you, such as in my case.

My first love:

I was 19 at the time and in my third year at a university in a provincial capital city of China.

Say that I had a family friend, Xiao Li, a girl who was a couple of years younger than me. It turned out that she was my huge fan and kept telling her friends how nice I was. One of her superiors at work heard about me and started telling Xiao Li what a wonderful son he had. Xiao Li finally got to meet him in person and was totally impressed. So a match meeting was set up by his father and Xiao Li with neither of us’ knowledge (or I wouldn’t have gone). Those days, I was particularly drawn to artistic people and very interested in social dance. When Xiao Li told me that I was going to meet a musician who could also teach me a few steps of dance, I said yes without hesitation.

We met and I madly fell for him. Love at the first sight only took seconds. The other day, I watched the movie ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ starring Brad Pit. I dare not to compare him to the famous movie star, but his charisma was as beautiful and elegant to my senses as the young Brad to the world. He was 24, was working for a respectable orchestra in Beijing and was visiting a music school in his home town where I schooled. He made it abundantly clear to his parents that he was not interested in finding a girlfriend outside Beijing, knowing the reality of how difficult it would be to get a residence permit (Hu Kou) in Beijing those days.

I think he must feel the same way about me, since we both eager to meet again. I initially called him ‘elder brother’ in a respectful Chinese way and stopped to call him by his name after a few meetings since I was not satisfied by simply being a ‘younger sister’ to him. That’s when he felt that we needed a reality talk. He told me how I impressed him and how he desired me as his girlfriend. He told me how slim a chance of getting a Beijing residence permit would be and how difficult to live separately if not getting one, not mentioning that how important his career in Beijing meant to him after years’ effort getting there, and he would have to wait for a few more years until my graduation and I might change my mind someday, and so on. I was quite taken back and hurt by his realty check. Being young and naïve, I thought love worth everything and overcome everything. Also being young and proud, I said to him that he convinced me that furthering our relationship was not practical. (That was my generation when people became boyfriend and girlfriend clearly with marriage in mind. I do understand that the young people nowadays may not necessarily think so).

My first love was thus crashed before it got anywhere. It was like a rose bud being dashed in a sudden ice rain storm without even a chance to blossom, to give out its permeating fragrance and flowering beauty under an otherwise bright and clear sky. The petals fell piece by piece. My love for him tormented me for the next two years and my loss has since lingered until today.

We continued seeing each other whenever he could find reasons to travel back home and wrote to each other when we couldn’t meet, like friends. Ironical may it sound today, we talked to each other those days about our loss and disappointment because we could not continue our love relationship. Though we promised each other to move on, we unwittingly dwelled on the sadness and found letting go was very difficult, esp. for me. I was not eating and sleeping well, sometime had headache and did not do as good as I should in my school work.

Finally, he came to me one day, also stressed out, apologized to me and said that he was now willing to move back and work at the local, if I were not assigned to Beijing upon my graduation. It was the point where I was most resentful of him for all my suffering. I calmly said to him that I was no longer the 19 years old. I said that I didn’t want to follow his decision any more –either he wanted me or not wanted me at a given time. I told him that I’d had enough.

It was the only time I saw tears in his eyes. After awhile, we went out. We took bus to a downtown store where he bought me a pair of eye glasses and stopped at a small restaurant where we had some delicious meat pies. It was a blandly enlightened and peaceful day to me and we hardly spoke of anything.  He saw me off to my bus to school before he took his to home. That was the last time I saw him.

I didn’t know him that well about his character and if he would truly suit me as a husband because of our limited time together. I did know that he was kind, honest, loyal, friendly, generous, and not very complicated. He never took advantage of my vulnerability. We never went beyond holding hands and kissing a few times.

I suppose that the first love for a lot of us is simply our desire to release our abundant emotional adolescent energy to someone who happens to have the right appeal to do the initiation and at the right place and time. In a way, unfortunately sometime, the first love often leaves lasting imprint to our lives.

It says that you can’t forget the people you once loved and I never forget about him. I did go to work in Beijing afterwards and never even tried to contact him. I did like Beijing and thought it was otherwise the most suitable place for a Northerner like me to live and work. But Beijing reminded me of the pain I suffered necessarily or unnecessarily in my youth and eventually I left the city for Canada.

I have never stopped missing him, loving him and wishing him all the good health and happiness. Our human heart is as broad and deep as ocean. At the dark un-ventured bottom you could find shipwreck pieces and other mysterious things, each telling a story about how it got there. You let them stay there, undisturbed or dissolved on their own as years go by. It may stir up bubbles at certain moments, reminding you of that tender part of you –as a vulnerable and loving human being. Life goes on. Other ships sail in and carry you to new adventures.

Maybe once in your life you do tell the story like what I did here, just to say that, despite of our differences, we have a lot in common.

Jan. 16, 2009

[林依]

回复 '我的注册笔名' 的评论 : 谢谢你来关注这篇旧文！你的评论写的很美，也是我的感同身受！再次感谢！

[我的注册笔名]

很喜欢倒数第二段，很美的文笔，谢谢依依的分享也愿你回想时释然而平静，没有怨艾和遗憾，只感谢年少时因为有他才能存在的清澈美好的回忆，象初春的风从林间拂过，来去匆匆，不可重逢，但却在那短暂的瞬间增添了你生命的经历和色彩。