Chapter 1: The First Love
        Can you recall the last time you tried something for the first time? No matter what it may have been, the first thing we think about when it comes to that experience is the feelings that came along with it. There are some things you do for the first time that are more monumental than others, one of the biggest being the first time we found ourselves falling in love.
Once upon a time…
        At the risk of sounding cliché, my first love stole my heart by merely being tall, dark, and handsome, a couple years older, and the captain of the basketball team. The morning after he asked me to be his official girlfriend, I waited at the end of the hallway before the bell rang to see him turn the corner and come in for a quick kiss. I was his girl and had never been more proud of anything in my life. My heart was full and unbroken, ready to explore these unchartered waters of love.
        Your first love is a very simple kind of love. You’ll find yourself writing him notes, looking forward to the goodnight text, holding hands in-between classes, and celebrating each month you are together. He will usually get you gifts of some sort, perhaps a silver necklace with a cubic zirconium heart attached to it. If he was old enough to drive, you would get the biggest thrill by simply riding shotgun alongside him, blaring whatever music he liked and pretending that you liked it just as much. If he was on a sports team, you would attend every game and wear a shirt with his last name on the back, just in case anyone forgot who you belonged to. Is this starting to sound familiar?
        This love showed us the beauty in simplicity, but it also showed us a shallow side of love. Although we may have thought we found the man we were going to marry at the age of fifteen, the truth is we did not understand the true necessities of love. We were allowing ourselves to fall for someone based off of a checklist which included superficial things that cannot carry a relationship for the long term. If he was older, an athlete, had his own car, made us feel like a rebel against our parents, took us shopping, or publically displayed affection at school then we considered it be an ever-lasting love. These things soon fade. The initial exhilarating feelings of finding love for the first time will only last for so long until life gets in the way.
        Your first love includes so many firsts in itself. That is exactly what made it all seem so beautiful, wild, and true. Your first kiss, your first dance, your first time sneaking out your window at night, or the first time making love. It all sounds like such a fairytale, but it didn’t play out how we all thought it would. You might have puckered your lips for your first kiss and he basically ends up licking your face. Your first dance might have been more painful than wonderful because you endured two minutes and thirty seconds of awkward silence. Sneaking out of your window to meet up with him might have been amazing until your mom called freaking out about where you were at 3 o’clock in the morning. If you ended up losing your innocence to your first love, it probably hurt, was a complete mess, and left you with so many questions the next day. Even though it may not have been just like the movie you saw, you were still breaking new barriers in life and feeling like you were becoming someone, or maybe just becoming a part of him.
        As this relationship is the first time we are exposed to many feelings, we allow ourselves to feel these things with the highest intensity. We throw the word "love" around, we spend all our money on our significant other, and we discover that fighting usually goes along with loving. These fights are immature, insignificant, and an extreme level of drama. A text came through from a girl in his class asking about homework, so naturally you start a screaming argument. He didn’t kiss you goodbye like he usually does, so you find yourself crying in the rain outside of his house. He hasn’t taken you to the movies on a date in weeks, so you sit up all night bickering about how he obviously doesn’t love you anymore. The only upside to all the intense fighting, is the intense making up you get to do. He shows up with flowers, writes you a sweet note with a CD he made for you, or makes sure to shower you with hugs and kisses at your friends’ party that weekend.

All Good Things Must Come to an End…
        I was with my first love for two years. When I look back on how we ended things for good, it was surprisingly mutual. We had the best times and the absolute worst times together, but in the end we finally realized that as much as we cared about each other, the excitement was over and creating a future together no longer seemed like something that would work. However, those years together were not wasted. We were incapable of understanding something that we didn’t know and had to test new waters of the possibility of love for ourselves. Possibility is what keeps us getting back up every time we fall down.
        A crucial part of relationship we don’t have with our first love is the act of loving our true self first. We become what we think they will love and put our needs completely aside. You lose your identity to them, and when you lose them, you will lose yourself. Although love is a selfless act we do for someone else, we first must understand that being together means becoming a team.
        Innocence is what we have going into this relationship and experience is what we leave with. As a teenage girl, we don’t know exactly who we are yet so we try on things we think we could be, things we want to be. I allowed myself to morph into his little partner-in-crime. No, I was his shadow. This wasn’t who I was, but the feelings that came from being next to him and living his life made me feel like I was untouchable. This was the beginning of learning just what people mean when they say that we do crazy things for love.
        You are learning so much about the world of relationships and as time goes by you start to get better ideas of what it’s like to put someone else before yourself. The only thing you can’t see yet is that however perfect, exciting, and much needed your first love is, odds are you won’t end up walking down the aisle towards him. Regardless, one of your favorite things to talk about with him is how you want get married and start your life together. I’m sure you had every single one of your future children’s’ names picked out, the pets you wanted, and the city you would reside in. At the time, school, jobs, and security meant nothing as long as you were together, and that is exactly how things usually go wrong.
        Nothing scared me at the time, because if I had him then I had everything. When it was time for me to attend college, I could start to see things for what they really were and had to move forward without him.

Reasons for the Seasons...
        One day you’ll find yourself wiping the dust off of an old yearbook and flipping through the pages until you see the face of your first love. The memories will come flooding back in and remind you of a simple, yet exciting time of your life, a time that we wouldn’t change for the world. Was your first love real love? Absolutely. You were new to the whole experience and doing what we all had to do; learn from it in order to continue to grow. We take the things we learned and search for something more. You now know a few things in a significant other that you want and what you don’t want. You know how to love and you know how to fight. You’ve felt the butterflies and you’ve put a crack in your young heart. This romance was a beautiful mess. The only thing you want to do after you fall in love is to continue being in love. If you can’t have that with this person, then somebody else will come along, because someone always does.