Sunday Scribblings: First Love

My first love was called Jim, and he had no sense of smell – he was born that way. It would always make me sad to think that when we split up, as we so painfully did, he would never catch a memory of me on the air as another woman walked past him wearing my scent. We met in a nightclub three days into a new decade, in 1990 when I was sixteen and he was twenty-three. Precocious teenager that I was I chatted him up, on the edge of the dance floor, Pernod and black in my hand. He had long dark hair and a goatee, and the kindest eyes that had ever landed on me. Our first proper date was a trip to the cinema to see When Harry Met Sally, and from that afternoon we saw each other every day. I was still at school, supposedly studying for my A levels, but I would sneak off to the bus stop before class and go to his house instead. Within six months I decided – with the wisdom of a child who wants to be grown up too soon – to leave school and move in with Jim. My only goal in life, back then, was to have a boyfriend, the legacy of an absent father. In my hurry to be grown up I found myself at seventeen living in a grotty bedsit with an unemployed labourer, permanently damp towels hanging over the wardrobe doors and two pet rats. Oh the glamorous life!

Despite the damp, I decorated our home with the standard issue hippy fare bought during trips to Glastonbury, our Mecca. I delighted in shopping for our groceries in the local street market, coming back home with bags full of vegetables and soya mince (we were vegetarian, of course, with rings in our noses and psychedelic swirls on our clothes). Weekends were spent dancing all night in chemically enhanced swells of joy, with occasional days spent with my family (despite the fact that Jim had stolen me from them, my mother and sister loved him). I had wrapped my needy arms around him so tightly I’m sure he couldn’t breathe, yet gradually we started to follow our own paths – me to art college to study photography, him singing in a local band. I loved Jim passionately and jealously, but the new world college opened up to me soon lured me away from him. I realised that I had outgrown my unemployed labourer, and one day, after listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue non-stop to bolster my nerve, he came home from band rehearsals and I told him I was moving out. Looking back on that day now, I can’t believe how heartless I was, but I was only nineteen. I had no conception of real emotions, real pain. I was selfish, and I was cruel, but I knew no better. Jim, understandably, was crushed. It was the first time I had seen him cry, and remembering this makes me feel so ashamed.

The months that followed were messy, with us getting back together only to part again. While I became caught up in new love stories at college, Jim got together with a friend of ours and last I heard they had a baby together. The irony is not lost on me that he is, one hopes, now settled with a family and I am here, on my own and grieving. It’s curious how things turn out, where the paths we choose take us.

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