Some things you don't know you miss until, out of nowhere, you have them back, or have them back but all wrong. The way, after a dream, where you've kissed someone who, in real life, you'll never kiss again, maybe you've never kissed at all, you wake up and realize, in the throbbing pit of your stomach, how impossible it is to live without kissing them again.
And it was through falling flat-on-my-butt in love with him that I realized the most important thing about first love: as deep as it is for you at the time, it's only a teaser for even more amazing things to come. And whether first love ends dramatically or hurtfully or simply, eventually all the emotional fog surrounding it clears and we can see that first love is so special because it's one of the few experiences in life when we follow only our heart - not reason, not 'rules', not what other people say. Maybe that's why we all hold on to our first love in some way - why we miss it or long for it, want to reclaim or redo it. Because first love opens our eyes to that feeling that everyone has been talking about, singing about, writing about. It makes you feel like you've crossed over from not knowing to knowing. With first love, everything is new and the possibilities it awakens in you are exhilarating.
We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
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