beimprobable's Journal

I experienced my first love when I was 21. She was an exchange student at my school and we were just good friends at first.

When she went back home, I came to visit her for a month in the summer of 2006. It was the most emotional rollarcoaster of a month I have ever experienced concerning another person. One night, we got drunk and listened this song we both loved on repeat with the lights out and candle burning, lying on our stomachs side by side on the floor.

"This is a good song," she said and I nodded.  "It makes me want to hold someone really really close and never let go."

And I knew she was talking about him, so I just nodded my head and put my head down thinking about the time she was talking on the phone with him, how she was so girly and bubbly with him, so happy, and it made my heart feel like a vice had clenched shut all around it. It's hard to breathe in the moment you heart is broken, so I held my breath and covered my eyes. 

Then she said, "Oh, you're crying."

And she scooted over and stroked my hair and ran her fingers through it. She did things like that. She didn't react to things like a normal person. She was like a character from a novel or a short story, someone intentionally created to do and say things that take other people off guard. Really, any normal person would have asked me what was wrong, would have told me to stop crying. But she just ran her fingers through my hair.  That moment ended with me walking out on her to go for a walk.

On the plane home, I found this note addressed to me to in my bookbag. It was from her but it was written entirely in Japanese. All I could read was the title "Girls and Boys" and the first line, "I don't understand girls."

Now, two and a half years later, I can finally manage a meager translation. Here's a small sample:

I, for sure, definitely don't want to be your friend. You're not supposed to want your friends the way I want you.

And then she said she wants to get married and have kids, but at the same time, she wanted me too, and that she can't have both those things. So, she's letting go of me and that, after I got on that plane, she was planning to cut ties completely. It's a really drastic and melodramatic reaction, I think, and I only know about it two years later, when I'm over her, but that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt any less. Or that it'll lessen my anger. 

And I am angry at her. She didn't give me a chance. She didn't choose me. She didn't even want to try. I'm back in Japan and I'm here for a while, but she's succeeded in cutting ties. And now that I can read this note...

I thought about burning it or throwing it away, but that note has been tucked inside my wallet for two and a half years. Would I miss it? Is my inability to discard it proof that a part of me is not over her yet?  Or is this just an extension of that too often quoted but none-the-less true cliche that you never forget your first love?