I Want To Be Your First Love

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I am always the girl that comes after your first love. I am The Sequel. I am the Grease 2 of relationships, people in your life probably don’t even realize I exist — and if they do, they forget about me quickly. I’m not nearly as good as the first, but I do exist on my own accord and nobody seems to acknowledge that. I am your second place contestant, the one that wins only because the first place contestant quit. One thing always remains constant: I will never be as good as the first.

But I just want to be someone’s first love. I want to devastate and scar someone, the way that only falling in love for the first time can. I want to inspire someone, to change their life the way first loves only can. I want to dig my fingers into your heart and mark it with my hands like freshly fallen snow.

I want too much, I know. But the pressing need to be known as someone’s first love is still there. I think that as another run-of-the-mill girlfriend, I’m disappointing and unoriginal. But if I were to be someone’s first love, I could be new and exciting, devastating, and heart-wrenching. Everything is different the first time, you notice the little things and everything feeling is new. Then once it’s over, you’re immortalized in someone’s mind as a romanticized caricature of yourself. I want that. I want at least one person to remember me that way.

I want to captivate someone. I want to be the most beautiful thing someone has ever seen, to be someone’s muse. I want to be the one that sets the bar for everyone that comes after me, and I want nobody else to pale in comparison. I want to be the first to peer into someone’s soul. I want to be the first to soothe that raw, needy ache that everyone feels. I know that nothing is ever as good as the first time, and I want to be that good. Just once. Please.

Instead, I am always the calm after the storm. I’m the one left to pick up the pieces; left behind by a storm I was not present for. Sometimes, I am left to reach in and pull someone from the wreckage. I am relationship FEMA. I’m the receiver of jaded sighs, tentative confessions. I’m left to climb over walls put up long before my arrival, to decipher codes I don’t understand. I have to work harder, to finish something that I didn’t even start. It always happens. If I were a member of the X-Men, it would be my super power. It’s not fair.

I’m the one left to fill shoes I never wanted in the first place. I’ll never be as good as The First, and I know that. But they never do. I know that anyone I date will have an ex, but that’s nothing compared to being the one that comes after the First Love.

It’s not fair. I want all of you, not just fragments and pieces left behind by someone else. Nothing I do will fill the hole in your heart left by another person. I want to love all of you, and I want you to love all of me freely and without bias. Am I not worthy of holding that place in someone else’s heart?

I am never the girl who inspires anything. I am never the girl that leaves you so devastated that, years later, the thought of me makes your heart ache. I am the sequel that gets buried and forgotten, never quite as good as the first. I am the utterly forgettable one.

featured image – Alessandra Celauro