𝒯𝒽𝑒 𝐵𝑜𝓎 𝐼 𝐿𝑜𝓋𝑒𝒹 𝒶𝓉 15 𝒮𝓉𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝐿𝒾𝓋𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓃 𝑀𝓎 𝐻𝑒𝒶𝒹

I still love the first boy I ever loved, even though I know damn well it wasn’t mutual. I was just a chapter in his life, while he was the whole book in mine.

When I say my first love story, I want to clarify something: not in the way people imagine love stories. There was nothing perfect about it. It was mysterious, childish, and very innocent from my side. It was my first gate into experiencing feelings for someone outside of the love I had always known for my parents or siblings.

But somehow, even now, years later, my heart still reacts before my brain does. If I see him randomly, I still feel that little shake inside me.

And what confuses me the most is that now I’m older. I understand things from a totally different perspective from a feminist perspective, from the perspective of a girl who knows what she wants, from a more emotionally mature perspective.

Some of the things he said that I once thought were compliments… weren’t really compliments. They were comments about my body, sometimes framed as praise, sometimes not. Some of them were subtle sexual hints that I didn’t fully understand at the time.

I was so innocent back then, waiting for my crazy love story like in the movies I grew up watching, completely clueless about the reality of it all. Back then I just felt flattered. Maybe I felt the kind of attention from the opposite gender that I had always quietly craved.

Now I realize that some of those things would probably make me uncomfortable if someone said them to me today.

So sometimes I ask myself:

Why do I still romanticize him?

I think nostalgia is powerful like that. It doesn’t just preserve memories—it preserves the version of us who felt them. Sometimes we don’t actually miss the person; we miss the version of ourselves who loved them.

I mourn that little innocent girl in me who loved him. She was so pure, believing that something beautiful would finally happen to her, daydreaming about living happily ever after with that one boy.

When I remember him, I’m not just remembering the boy. I’m remembering the girl I was softer, younger, experiencing everything for the first time. Every word felt important. Every small moment felt like a story.

First love writes itself very deeply in us. It’s like writing on a white page for the first time it can’t be erased easily. Even when we grow up and see things more clearly, that first emotional imprint doesn’t completely disappear.

Maybe nostalgia doesn’t mean the past was perfect.

Maybe it just means the feelings were real.