LOVE
Is the first cut always the deepest? The intense longing of a formative crush, the lingering ache of an early heartbreak, the thrill of a first-ever fling later in life… on the pages ahead, three writers explore the magic of newfound experiences in love
Something miraculous happened when my school for boys went coed. We stood, slack-jawed, one September day, as a cohort of south London girls walked through the gates, like aliens making first contact. Not that there was much contact to begin with. Those early months were spent fearfully circling this strange new species. Where had they come from? Did they want things? What did they want? They were like film stars to us, with their poise and whispers and high laughter.
It was intoxicating – the Braille of bra straps through white shirts was a language we had never spoken. And then I found a translator.
Freya was in the year below me, but friendly and precocious.
Strangely, I don’t remember how we started talking. With the people I’ve been closest to, I fall into a curious sense that they’ve always been there. It was the same with two boys I came to know in the year above me – in particular, Sol. He was an outsider, like me. He had an air of calm to him and was kind to everyone, yet somehow cool. After a lonely childhood, I suddenly had friends.
Freya, though, was something else. She told me what the girls were talking about, who fancied whom. We talked about feelings and dreams, subjects beyond the ken of the boys I’d been surrounded with. We would fall about laughing at our private jokes. She had an abundance of thick, honey-coloured hair, soft brown eyes. There were dreams I didn’t tell her about.
We spent lunchtimes together, sometimes Sol joining us, swapping Manic Street Preachers lyrics. We laughed at the boys who had crushes on her and took Cosmo sex quizzes that none of us
were qualified to answer. Freya and I would sometimes cross paths in the corridor, between chemistry and art. We would slip each other a tiny smile, as our classes trooped past in parallel.
Ah, the thrill of secret alliance! Which I interpreted as the stirring of forbidden love.
Is it a requisite that a crush be unrequited? Perhaps this is what makes crushes so… delicious. We create the beloved in our image of perfection, and we pin them to that role, like a butterfly. I would give her everything, I told myself of Freya, a projection that was built on her requiring nothing of me at all. The more fulfilling affairs that would come in later years brought lessons in compromise, too. I believe real love is a tr
