First love     

        He was my first love, and I know I will never feel anything like that again. I was... 5, and he was... 5 too. In a monstrous, massive yard in the center of a metropolitan city, we were two tiny infant souls in love among a bunch of young and not-so-young kids. When he looked furtively from a far corner of the yard in my direction, intercepting his glance, I pretended not to see, not interested. "Hey, Bobby, go kiss your fiance!" the kids teased us, chicks. 

      In my dreams, I imagined myself and Bobby holding hands, and we were holding hands endlessly, which brought such untold pleasure. "To kiss"? Oh, no, it sounded filthy. Who knows where this would have led if soon Bobby's family hadn't moved to another city? Then the everyday blah life in the yard stretched for years until I was 16.

Second love

    I grew up as an introverted girl. Neither my appearance nor the open envy of my girlfriends wasn't enough to pull out my persona from the box it was hidden in. It seemed even the sunlight could not penetrate to reach the virgin soul of a fearful chamois as my gaze was covered behind the always-looking-at-the-ground eyes. 

      That summer, my mom took me on a short vacation to the Lake of Writers. This unusual name was given to a small but immersed in mystical beauty lake lost somewhere on the forest's edge. Someone set up a ping-pong table there. As a sophisticated ping pong player, I did not stand but spent at least an hour playing daily with a handsome 18-year-old boy.

When we didn't play, I pretended not to notice the green-eyed, black-haired toned young man, the son of a writer from a weekend house near the lake. When I didn't look in his direction, he stared at me; my mom told me so. Sweet 16, and I was in love. Unfortunately, I played uninterested so well that the boy didn't approach me on my last vacation day, and of course, he didn't dare to ask for my phone number. I knew his name, and he knew mine, that's all. For the next two years, I don't remember a day I spent without bitter tears, praying and calling to higher powers to let me at least fleetly see my Romeo (it was a real boy's name!). 

      When I turned 18, on my first day at the university, on the first bell, running up the stairs to my classroom, I heard, "Princess! Give me your phone number quickly!" It was him, my long-waited secret love. He called me the same day. The young man was a student at a law school. We agreed to meet and then walk along the main street in the city's center. I saw him from the far waiting, holding a bunch of forget-me-nots with both his hands pressed against his chest. It was my first date, my first ball; the world was spinning around me. I was the happiest girl on the planet. We walked hand in hand, like old acquaintances, like new lovers. It was a bright sunny day; everything was orange under the sun - the sky, people, my love, except the magnetic green eyes under the long black eyelashes.

      After sunset, we wandered into an unknown club where live music was playing. He ordered something for us both to stay there for a while and dance. I danced with a young man for the first time in my life. Feeling his body so close to mine was fascinatingly dazzling, and then... the first kiss, not more than on my forehead, still myriad butterflies swirled my head and whole body. That first closeness was a real closeness between a man and a woman, an apogee of genuine enjoyment among and, over all of the thrills physical love can give that will never come again. 

      But the enemy did not sleep. Evil girls saw me with the young man of their dreams and decided to trample on our love, to strangle the relationship that had begun in the bud. On the next day, so much slander was shed on my shoulders against my beloved one that inexperienced and naive, I could not deal with that perfect description of a "lecherer." The next, not month, a year, my dearest Romeo showed everywhere I was, always behind me and begging me to explain what happened. Feeling rip-me-apart blazing love, ready to faint, I used to stay numb, asking God to withstand.

    Then came my graduation day; I was married and went to accept my diploma under a different name. That's when I learned about the insidious conspiracy against my innocent love. I've never seen Romeo again, although I never let him go from my heart. They said he had left the country. Years passed. I got divorced. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (times are changing, and we are changing with them). Time has gifted me with more wisdom and more self-confidence. Still, the inner flame of my youthful love simmering in my memories never stopped. The technology of the 20th century, developing by leaps and bounds, allowed me to find all the information about my lost somewhere on the edge of the forest love. My lovely boy, my beloved man, had never left the country. He got married late. He died, leaving two young kids. Then, it was insane, from a social media his widow addressed to me, yes, to me! She told how she and her husband were in a nightclub when a drunken crud started leaning towards her. Romeo stood up for his wife and was stabbed in the very heart, with no chance of getting saved. In the left pocket of his jacket, she found an old photograph of a girl with a blue hairband. The photo was black and white; only the band was colored with a blue pencil. His wife knew from the beginning that he did not love her but was a gentle partner and a good father. "My husband always carried a picture of a girl with a blue hairband wherever he went; I never asked who it was," she wrote at the end of her story and added, "I still hope to find an already adult woman so I can tell her she now has a guardian angel."

I am not young anymore, but each time I feel hopeless, with no way out, I see the image of the dear green-eyed boy waiting for me with a bunch of forget-me-nots, waiting and smiling and looking at me with so much love and tenderness that feeling this first and genuinely true love again and again, I do not condemn anyone.

“For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”