theory
maybe if first love is like learning to count to add and subtract and making careless mistakes, and in subsequent relationships, as you get older you have word problems and how you're going to divide 'us' but you get better at how to manipulate numbers and all of a sudden alphabets and p stands for the girl with her nose in a book and the quantity of q is the boy strumming his heart out and x is that one that grew on you slowly but surely and as you learn more and more you find the capacity of astonishment increases towards infinity and all the while the same rules apply, but warped to the complexities of new textbooks and you're wandering on tangents as the learning curve sharpens, noticing that every 'x' leads you down a different line and so you discover there isn't really a first, second or nth love at all, they are all congruent, and that geometry and calculus and statistics all string together and you step back and see that the proof that all you have learned is a single, breathing polygon entity and you are armed with this strange all encompassing love and then, you hunt for that one equation you can solve for the rest of your life