First Love

A mighty pain to love it is,
And ’tis a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.

  ~ Abraham Cowley

I dreamed of him last night, the boy I fell in love with when I was thirteen. I call it love and not infatuation or a crush because I’ve never really felt the way I felt for him in my life for nearly a decade since then. Yes, I am in love now but this love never matches the selfless, innocent feelings I had for him, the only difference being I am in a relationship now, while I was in a one-sided love affair with him then. Ah…the pain of unrequited love, the regret of not being able to confess your feelings to that one person you wish to be with!

It was a love inspired by reading stories and believing in dreamy romantic movies, it was a love fueled by the look in his deep black eyes, it was a love kept alive by imagining different ways by which we would end up together. I was a foolish little girl who waited for him to come to school, who prayed everyday to somehow make him sit next to her, who was hopelessly in love with him. I loved the way he fought with our seniors, I loved the way he argued with teachers, I loved the way he narrated his heroic stories. Oh yes, he was a bad boy but I liked him the way he was. The love I had for him was so deep that I kept being in love with him for six years, even when I left the town, even when I met new and interesting people in an exciting new city, even when he used my name to gain popularity, even when he broke my heart.

I don’t blame you if reading this makes you think of me as an insane person, I know I was mad…mad in his love. And even though I have been in love again, a love that has made me sane, I still see him in my dreams.Sometimes I see him laughing at me, sometimes I see myself running away from him, hiding myself from his view but the dreams I like the most are the ones when I see him smiling at me, looking at me with the love I always desired.

He was someone I could never have, may be that’s what made me to be in love with him for such a long time. And even though I spent all my teenage life dreaming about him and wishing foolishly for him to acknowledge my love,I don’t regret a moment of it. I smile thinking about it…about how selfless and oblivious love could be, how falling in love sometimes shapes up our lives, how unrequited love changes people sometimes into a generous and sometimes into an indifferent person.

A quote by Haruki Murakami sums it all for me,

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star.
It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more.Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”