You left me broken and shattered. You made me lose faith in humanity, and in love. You were the first person to show me that love could be the best yet worst thing that could happen to you. Now, I could easily sit here and fabricate lie after lie about how much I hate you, but truth is that couldn’t be further from the truth. I still care about you and will never stop. I think that deep down, I’ll always care and there will always be a part of me that wishes things hadn’t ended the way they did; because really, who ever truly gets over their first love?

Before you, it seemed impossible to comprehend why everybody was so obsessed with love. This strange concept, most commonly known as “true love,” seemed so foreign to me. How could somebody be so in love with another human that everything else around them simply seemed to vanish, and it just feels like the two of you against the world? In my young mind, that feeling just ceased to exist. When I was a child, I recall making fun of the love songs on the radio because I believed that they were “cheesy” or “cliché.” It wasn’t until I fell for you that I realized that those feelings described in those love songs were all too real.

Falling for you was a slow process, but when I fell, I fell hard. It felt every bit as magical as every Nicholas Sparks film or novel ever conceived. It was the butterflies in my stomach every time your name lit up my phone screen, and the seemingly irresistible urge to hug or kiss you every time I was in your presence. Staying up on the phone until 4am on a school night became routine and even though we both knew we would be dead tired in the morning, neither of us cared. Even when we ran out of topics to talk about or stupid jokes to laugh it, we’d sit in complete silence for hours and be totally content because just the other person’s presence was enough. Those songs I formerly referred to as “cheesy” or “cliché” soon became the only thing I would listen to because it reminded me of us. It was love in every sense of the word. Adults are under the assumption that teenagers cannot fall in love, but I know that to be untrue. And if that wasn’t love, then damn that had to be the closest possible thing to it.

So no, I don’t regret my first love. How could you possibly regret something that made you so happy? You were the light in my darkness. You kissed me like I was beautiful, and for once I believed it. You believed in me even when I couldn’t believe in myself. You saw even my ugliest parts — the inner-most parts — I never dared show to anyone and still stayed. You made me believe in love. Sometimes an old song comes on and still reminds me of you. I don’t know whether to cry or smile. I’ll continue to search for pieces of you within everyone I meet, and I may never find you again.

Who knows where we went wrong... Perhaps it was just fate. It was fate that brought us together, and fate that tore us apart. Dwelling on the ‘what ifs’ will not change the past. It just makes it that much more difficult to move on. I learned that some relationships are simply meant to come and go in our lives just like the seasons, and we must learn to accept that, no matter how devastating that may be. Although that part of my life is gone and I might never get a chance to experience it again, the one thing I still have are memories – and that’s something nobody can ever take from you.

And perhaps someday when the timing is right, our paths will cross yet again and we could start over.