When I met who I thought was my first love at the tender age of thirteen. I am going to write that age in numbers just so we can all see how smart I thought I was with my know-it-all horrible attitude – 13.
Did I even know what love was at that point? No. Did I think I knew? Yes. A hundred times yes.
See, thirteen is a very innocent age, and as much as I imagined spending the rest of my life with him and naming our children this and that, I knew that was a long shot. Still, it didn't deter the young me. The young me thought that now that I was with the boy I liked the most in the world (let that sink in!), I needed to fight against the world for us to be united.
Love was so innocent. A transfer student in the middle of the previous year from Florida.
Florida! I used to dream about places like Florida. Florida is where people party and do everything in open what they have to be clandestine about in the rest of India. Florida… beaches. Parties. Drugs. Alcohol. Sex. That's what I thought Florida was, and hence, the appeal that I was with a transfer dude was certainly making myself look better in my own eyes. It was that kind of love!
What did we even know at the age of 13? Vibing to the same songs, sending each other the last message of the day, exchanging notes discreetly, stealing glances at each other across classes, and acting like, hey, we don't even know each other. We weren't even friends, because if anybody knew that we were whatever we were, they'd be able to guess. They'd know, because it'd be so obvious. So we hid it—from the world.
Love stayed 500 metres from me, and we'd meet in the evening by the yellow bridge and talk about our classmates. I think I picked up gossip from him, honestly. Love was walking two metres across from each other, the silent presence still being comfortable.
Love was sending each other songs that reminded us of each other, and Bluetooth days in the garden close to our house.
Love was… just… not complicated.
Love was spending summer vacation together. Love was crying because I had to head back to my hometown over the summer to be with my family, and obviously, it was breaking my heart to leave my love alone. Love was sending Facebook messages in the morning and wasting my daily data on him. I use the term waste now, because hindsight is 20/20.
The maximum action I was willing to exchange at this age was hugs. And hold on! Hugs were a big deal. They were like a BIG-BIG deal. We don't hug. I was not a hugger. I'd never hugged a boy. I hadn't even hugged my brother, because we don't do hugs. So hugging someone at thirteen was the equivalent of having sex with them, because whoa, we're moving too fast now.
We hugged once.
On the day
we broke up.
Or rather, he broke up with me.
Even though this love only lasted for two months—until love realised that I was, in fact, not in love with him, because I was simultaneously texting another classmate. How dare I? How dare I have friends?
So love left me to be with another classmate less than five days later. I had to listen to Chris Daughtry's Over You for the nth time in a row with my girlfriends to heal from my first-ever trauma, a.k.a. my breakup. This also led to losing the same group of friends, and class get-togethers becoming more awkward later. Though frankly, I think I've met him once, or maybe twice, after we went our separate ways.
My ex-love and his ex-love were together for, say, five years? So maybe they were meant to be—more than I was meant to be with him. Until one day, I woke up to a call from him, bitching about his ex-love. Like, brother, I haven't spoken to you in forever. Give me some time??
Looking back, I think that was truly the most careless I'd been in love. And though the breakup shattered me for, like, five fucking minutes—bless Chris Daughtry for sharing a banger song with the world—I realise it was too early for me to know love.