I still remember the first moment I fell in love. I was 18, she was 16, and in that moment, the world around me didn’t exist. It was there, but I could not feel it, or see it. All that mattered was the face of the girl in front me. Her name was Danielle, and to me she was beautiful, both spiritually and physically. It had never occurred to me before that night that I might be falling in love with her, but a flick of the switch lit up my mind in a moment of perfect clarity.
The moment is really what was beautiful to me. The moment when I realized that my heart was no longer under my control. A mixture of helplessness, combined with a subtle beauty and happiness was taking over my emotions, carrying me away to a euphoric state of being, in which the only thing that mattered was the girl lying next to me in bed. That feeling, of two hearts and souls becoming one, will forever be the purest feeling that this world has offered me, a feeling I’ve been fortunate enough to feel twice.
For me, love isn’t just a word, or an action, but that state of being. You are in love or you aren’t, and if that feeling fades, then what you are left with are just affections. One may feel admiration, or respect for someone, wishing the best for them in times to come, but love is something that is beyond these sentiments. I may even go so far to say that it transcends conscious emotion, and draws its existence from a deeper part of the human experience (but I am sure my philosophical peers would have many criticisms of such a statement).
For these reasons, heartbreak now makes more sense to me. Just like I’ve fallen in love twice with two beautiful souls, I’ve had my heart broken by the very same souls. Heartbreak is devastating, but must necessarily be so, for I have come to understand it as the polar opposite of falling in love. To remove that feeling, one so pure and true, must be equally pure. The difference is that it does not stem from a euphoric happiness, but rather of its opposite, unhappiness. If I were to use the metaphor of two souls becoming one, then the act of heartbreak is splitting that one connection back into two, which would understandably bring with it a great deal of pain.
Coming off of a fresh heartbreak, it is easy for me to stay in this feeling of despair. My heart is still bleeding from the separation, and it sometimes feels impossible to try and connect it with another while it is still losing parts of itself. Despite this, I find myself returning to the very first moment I fell in love, not the second one. For me, thinking of the innocence of my first love reminds me of why I must continue pursuing it. The feeling of a clueless young man chasing an even younger, more clueless girl, only to arrive to a moment that he could not possibly prepare himself for, is truly beautiful.
And so, for my next love, it is fundamentally important to me that I capture the magic. The magic of my first love.