the first boy i ever loved

my very first love was a strawberry-blond boy with eyes as vast and innocent as the blue sky. he had a smile that would burst from his face like sunbeams every time he looked over at me. 

i was eleven, the youngest girl in high school, a straight-A principal’s list kinda gal. 

he was thirteen, the youngest of thirteen kids in his family, most of whom were in jail for drugs. 

if we had been part of an indian caste system, he would have been an untouchable, and i, a brahmin. 

he didn’t care, though. and neither did i. 

we were unconfined by social norms. 

but that didn’t stop every teacher, every ninth-grader, every higher-upper in the school from scolding us to our faces or snickering behind closed doors. 

it didn’t bother me, though. because when we walked hand-in-hand in circles around the hallways at lunchtime, i was in a bubble of bliss that nobody could pop with my sweet love right there beside me. 

this little boy… treasured me. 

i would sit on his lap, face-to-face, after school, outside on the basketball court. and he would gaze into my eyes for hours and hours like i was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. he was rough on the outside, a true street kid… but with me, he was the utmost tender. and i loved all sides of him, his lover and his fighter, and the way he would smash anybody up for me. 

he protected me like no boy ever had before then. 

he treated me like the most precious golden gem. 

and even though he came from nothing, i was certain he would amount to something. 

his mother had died, years before, from a bout of terminal cancer. his older brothers had spent their days beating the shit out of him before they were jailed for other things. he didn’t have a father, and he lived with some distant relative that didn’t care for him. 

the teachers treated him like scum, and so did most of the other kids. 

but he had a charm to him that i couldn’t resist: a pure and lovable innocence. 

i saw him for who he truly was, and to me— he was my prince. 

he wrote me love letters, in his scrawling handwriting, and told me that one day, he wanted to be a writer. 

‘you will be,’ i said to him, with my 11-year-old devotion, ‘you’ll be the best writer in the whole wide world.’ 

‘… in fact, you already ARE.’

and i would champion him to the teachers who loved me and i would say, ‘read this! isn’t he amazing? he’s the very best writer in the whole wide world and i’m so lucky because this boy loves me.’ 

and some would tolerate it, and some would say sternly, ‘you better stay away from that boy, sufey.’ 

but i wouldn’t. i would melt deeper into his kisses, and the way he held me so tenderly. 

he was the first boy who kissed me, in this intoxicating way, in a way that made me feel like i would be loved, forever. he made me feel something i had never felt before. like God was real, and he was Good, and that everything would be okay. 

nobody else existed when he was around. 

i couldn’t see past the crystalline blue of his eyes. 

and not once, never once, did he ever hurt me. 

he told me that with me, he was the happiest boy alive.

the school year came and went, and summer arrived. 

i was not allowed to see him outside of school, and i wasn’t to see him in school either, again. 

i called him once, on our rotary-dial phone, to tell him i wasn’t allowed to be with him anymore. 

my fingers trembled as i clicked each number into place, and tears streamed from my eyes.

he was silent, and kind, and accepting. 

‘i’ll still love you, no matter what,’ he said to me. 

and i never saw him again. 

september came, and school started again, and he was nowhere to be found. 

nobody knew what had happened to him, whether he was dead or alive. 

i asked the teachers, and the one other person in school that would talk to him. 

nobody knew where he had disappeared to. 

nobody cared even a little bit about him. 

nobody except for me. 

school that year was a dreary black cloud where sunshine once had been. 

there was a grayness, a void, an empty feeling of dread, a deep and haunting unknowing. 

nobody else in his life had loved him, except for me. 

where could he have possibly gone? 

the years came and went, and life came and went, and i didn’t date anyone for the remainder of my high school years. i kept to my studies, and buried myself into my books, and wondered where the sunshine had gone. 

many years later, when i was in university, and dating someone else, i saw my young love unexpectedly on a bus. 

i was with a friend of mine, who had known both of us at the time, and she shockingly pointed him out to me. 

he was slumped, and gray, and his eyes were bloodshot, and when i walked towards him, i could not recognize him at all. his body was bones beneath raggedy old clothes, and the innocence had vanished from his eyes. his speech was slurred, his smile was gone, and my heart shattered into a million jagged shards. there were scars on his face (were they from knives?) and a vapid empty darkness to his aura. 

‘ding,’ went the bus, and i arrived at my stop. 

my friend tugged my sleeve, and i slowly followed her off99. 

i never saw him ever again. 

but his image would haunt me, many years into the future, as i wondered if i had done that to him. 

‘if only, if only…’

if only i had stayed, would he have become a different person? 

would he have become that writer? a beautiful, brilliant, bright-eyed man? 

what happened between now and then? 

and i live with plagues of unanswered questions, buried deep down in my soul. 

and sometimes, when the dust kicks me hard enough, a sliver of them will show.