The first thing you must understand about your first love is that it may not be the first person you ever fall in love with. It may be your second or your fourth or even your eighth love, but you’ll know when it’s real. Trust me. You’ll know because once you know it’ll be the only thing that you ever truly know and when they walk out of your room for the very last time, your heart will almost stop beating, almost. So here’s how to heal it.
I’ll start off by saying that it will not be easy. You will become a lifeless garden as the person who grew flowers in all of your dark and empty places just disappears.
You will not be okay to begin with, but that is okay. You must go outside. You must go to the places where you both used to go and continue to do your favourite things. If you hide from your life, trying to avoid their memory, you won’t do anything. When you try and do nothing, all you will do is think of them.
You will work through the stages of grief; you will begin to hate yourself for falling apart over something intangible, but this is good. For you to learn to love again, you must start with yourself. You, like all others, have an infinite capacity for love, but like any skill left unused, it will begin to wilt and die if you mope and wait to be rescued.
As you work through this grief, you will stumble upon acceptance. It will be tough and trying but let’s not forget how far you’ve come somehow from the wilting gardens and duvet days. Keep going. Even if it hurts. You are on a cusp of a new beginning; do not dwell on the past. All dwelling does is create grey matter, I’ve created enough of that to last a lifetime and trust me- it never gets you very far. The first person I ever loved died. We weren’t always on great terms but knowing that we would never again breathe in the same air as them or sit down together to watch sunrise and sunset in the same sitting has been both horrible and hard. But I’m living with it because every new beginning must come from some other beginning’s end. I am learning to be happy again.
Guilt will probably come next. You will feel guilty as you become familiar with the freckles on another person’s back, as their laugh becomes your favourite sound and your old memories start fading to grey. This is good; this is you starting to heal. Do not cling to the past. You deserve to be happy, you deserve good things and deep down you know there are reasons why things fell apart. Issues bigger than the two of you that you cannot change.
As we reach the stages of moving on, there are two cardinal sins you must not commit: do not reach out and call them and do not compare other people to them. Drunk phone calls seem so easy and frivolous, you may even hear the ‘I love you too’ that you are so desperate for, but let me tell you now- you will be strangled by telephone wires, reaching for a love that barely makes it through the static. You will be torturing yourself. Do not torture yourself, please. As for comparison, it will just leave you running in circles. The problem with memories is that our brains try to glaze out the things that hurt. They may have said all the right things when you cried, but how often did they cause the tears? New people deserve a fighting chance. Weigh up the good and the bad – if the positives outweigh the flaws then forget about green eyes and late night drives and start believing in brown hair and sunsets. Dreams are not set in stone- allow yourself to find a new dream out there.
Getting over your first love will be hard. When the person you planned your future with- the person who promised you adventures and laughter and rose-red doors- lets you down it is okay to feel lost. But you’ll make it through this. Give yourself enough time to recover, ignore other people’s views on your relationships and efforts to rebuild your life and please, try to be happy. You deserve so much more than flaky people and bad sex. Your fast beating, sometimes shaky, sometimes broken heart deserves so much more.
