First love.
How many people
can really remember the very first time they fell in love? I'm talking about
that all consuming love that is a driving need (not specifically romantic love,
but the love you developed for something you had previously not had). Not many
people can remember where they put their keys, how are they going to remember
something that happened to them before they were two or three or five?
Sometimes I think
the love a toddler feels is more pure and more intense than any other love we
feel in our entire lives.
Why?
Because its the
first time, the actual, literal first time that happens.
You can only try
chocolate for the first time once. Just once. And if that had happened when you
were older, you might actually remember the nuances of the cocoa on your
tongue, or how your brain felt like it did a flip-flop. You might actually
recall the feeling of consuming the creamy warm taste, and how you wanted to
wrap your tongue around all of it. You wanted it in you, you needed to be
blanketed in it. But for most people (at least in the US and most western
European countries) we don't remember that first bite, or falling in love with
chocolate. If we are lucky, we have photographic evidence. Proof that we tried
to merge our entire being into the chocolate, tried with everything we had to
be one with our new found love, i.e. that baby picture with the chocolate
smeared all over your face and hands, and in your baby hair.
But love is pretty
neat in that it feels to be the first time, every time. Each new love is just
as intense as the very first one. It would be horribly boring if that weren't
the case. We would stop falling in love with books, movies, foods, people, if
love did not constantly renew itself to feel like the first one. Falling in
love always feels like a first love. There is that adrenaline rush, the need to
always be with your love. It's no less poignant because its not the first time,
its no more profound because its the fifth time. Love has this timeless quality
to be just that, love.
It's what gives
people hope. To know they can fall into a love as earth shatteringly intense
the tenth time, as they did that very first time. Trust me there is nothing as
ground shaking as the love a toddler feels regarding anything if they love it.
We may not be as
quick to fall in love as we did when we were little. We may actively prevent
ourselves from developing those feelings with barriers of protection. But once
those barriers have been breached, once the fall has happened, love and all of
its emotions and sensations are just as fresh and intense.
Heartbreak
Unfortunately this
same, always the first, never diminishing in intensity and impact happens for
heartbreak. Its always earth shattering. Its always the worst thing to have
ever happened to you. Nothing before that moment and nothing after that moment
will cause you as much pain, ever. Until it happens again. And it never gets
easier.
I guess thats why
people prevent themselves from falling in love again, to protect themselves
from the pain of heartbreak. But the joy and the endorphins of love are such a
heady high, I think they are always worth the risk.
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