Sunday Confessions: First loves

I'm a lover, by nature. I love most everyone, instantly, without questions. But today, it's time for a confession: I never even met my first love face to face.

My stepdad might tell you my first true love was a boy who rode my school bus, who was my best friend and who I did love, deeply. However, he loved boys, and obviously I'm not one of those. And I know now that the way I loved Frenchfry was not physical attraction, or romantic love. I love Frenchfry like an extension of myself. He is still my best friend, and even though he's moved on to bigger and better things like the city life and a gorgeous life partner, and we don't talk nearly often enough, I still love that boy.

But that's not what this is about. This is about my first "true love", the first boy I ever got flutter-in-my-tummy crazy about. The first boy for whom I would have done anything. Sean, and I can't even remember his last name right now (I'll dwell on this for days now), I do know his birthday is July 15, though.

My first true love, the person I felt most connected to in the world, even to this day, though we haven't talked in years. I've never found someone I could talk to as easily as him, who I was so open and honest with (until recently). But the thing that my first true love and I were, before anything else, was friends.

I was an awkward teenager; I had social anxiety, I was "too smart for my own good," and even though I had a lot of friends in school, I didn't socialize much outside of school. The Internet was my venue of choice for social interactions, because I've always communicated better via writing. Well, anyway, I started talking to a boy from California in a Yahoo! chat. He was funny, quirky, a little perverted, and so easy to talk to.

I've always been on the heavy side, I was definitely insecure as a teenager, and through most of my 20's, though now I realize I'm fabulous, "every inch of [me] is perfect, from the bottom to the top," as the song goes.

But, when I was 15, that was not the case, and Sean made me feel beautiful, without ever seeing me. We did eventually exchange photos, and I talked my mom into buying a webcam so that we could video chat (which, incidentally, would later get me grounded, ahem). Neither of us were strikingly good-looking, but that wasn't at all what mattered.

We had a two-year relationship via the Internet. It was intense, and when it ended, I was crushed. I had made all these plans, I was a year away from going to college in California, and it turns out, Sean was just a boy, and he had boy needs that I couldn't meet from however many thousands of miles away. I was naive, but I was a girl in love. That was my junior year, and it was a dark, dark year for me. I failed three classes (without ever losing my spot in the top 10 of my class), tried to commit suicide, forced my mother to pay for an apartment that she wasn't living in because I couldn't stand to be around, basically, anyone. I was definitely an emo-teen. I was locked in my own shell, as I so often was as a child.

I'm happy to say that I've since moved on from Internet relationships (obviously, my hard drive didn't knock me up). I can't say that what the boys' dad and I have is "true love," not in the fairytale sense. But I do love the asshole, most days, when I'm not thinking about smothering him with his pillow.