1. 07 September 2011 · 10:54 AM ·

    First love (never) dies.

    When people asked me who my first love was, trust me, I didn’t know what to answer them. As the definition of the first love itself is unknown to me.

    I wasn’t sure about my first love, but every time I thought about it, my mind was going in a flashback to my childhood.

    I spent most of my every summer holiday until I’m 13 in my Grandma’s house in the countryside. It was a small and quiet town, but it was a really beautiful place. Grandma’s house was on the lake side, and the view was amazing, especially from Grandpa’s library on the third floor.

    My summer holidays there were usually quiet. It wasn’t boring but I had nothing much to do. I was mostly the only grandchild who always went there on summer. Oh, and him.

    He was probably in his mid teens when I first met him. I was probably 8 or 9. He was the cousin I rarely met.

    He stole my favourite spot on the library, a couch attached to a huge window that had a view to the lake. He usually sat there with his one leg up in the couch and a book in his hand. The wind breeze that came in from the opened window gently stroke his golden hair. He and the lake view behind him was as perfect as a masterpiece painting. It was beyond words. Sometimes I wondered that he might catch a cold or got sick seeing him only wearing a white shirt. He looked so pale, fragile and lonely. But somehow, left a beautiful afterimage to me.

    He would rarely say hello. We rarely talked to each other too. But I always found myself searching for him every summer. And I always found him in that favourite spot of him. He, sometimes, would read something loud so I could listen to him. Poem and poetry, most of them. I never understood any of them but he looked happy and sad at the same time while he was reading it.

    The last summer I met him there, he finally said a word to me. With his gentle voice he asked me, “do you believe that first love never dies?”
    I, Of course, wasn’t able to answer that question. I was 12, what did you expect me to answer.

    I was prepared to answer that question the next summer. But he wasn’t there. He passed away on the previous autumn, shortly after the last summer I met him.

    Grandma told me that he had stayed there not only on summers but also all the time. He lived there, with grandma. He had a heart failure and weak lungs, that was why his parents sent him to live in the countryside, to have a better living environment. But he died, eventually.

    But the rumour that was going on around the town was that he had committed suicide, jumped off from the library window and not because of his sickness. I never knew the truth of this rumour, frankly said.

    When I went to the library and watched the place, he wasn’t there, definitely. And suddenly the image of him sitting there and slowly fell off the window came to my mind. I could imagine that he was smiling happily when he fell away.

    And this image of his, never went away from my mind, ever.

    “Do you believe that first love never dies?”