It goes without saying that a "first time" for anything can only happen once. The first time we went to school alone. The first time we drank alcohol. The first time we fell in love. Ah, yes - first love. It never rusts, does it? Or does it?
Until recently, I thought it advisable to get real and understand that memory often glamorises first love to the point of distortion, that it was not really how you thought it was. That may have been true for earlier generations but is it still true today? Facebook and other sites provide us with the unthinkable (at least for me at 67), that is because they provide us with a permanent "now" in the shape of hundreds of perfect colour photos and videos of us and the face of the beloved! We don't have to remember them because they are right there in front of our eyes! At 67, I have to admit that all I have of my childhood in the 50s and 60s are a number of fading and curling photos and some rapidly yellowing newspapers.
Nonetheless, photographs are not photographs of your feelings, are they? In my view, the words "first love never rusts" do not mean that this love remains forever a burning passion and does not fade away. I think it means that these first-time feelings are often sacred memories which we later look back on with a kind of reverence. And this reverence can be very powerful and inspirational. Among many novels/plays concerning first love, I would include: Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet, Le Grand Meaulnes and Love in the Time of Cholera.
A few weeks ago, I finished writing my novella - ...because it was you...- in which I tried to capture this idea. Tommy Mostyn (66) is looking back 50 years to his first love.
For many years after the war, Tommy turned, expecting to see Carla behind him and hoping to gaze into those big brown eyes. Time passed, the swinging sixties arrived, and other women took Carla’s place. But Tommy was delighted to find that Carla’s memory was already a habit to him, and when he gazed into the distance, he caught sight of her, the dark wavy hair, the alabaster skin and those big eyes. But memory fades and, by the middle of the eighties when his writing lost its public appeal, the fading reached a tipping point. The name “Carla” became a word without a clear thought and words without clear thoughts were dead things and this dead thing was attached to a blurred image of a girl, a mist of indeterminate shape and colour.
But Tommy was a writer. He knew that she lived in his books and this offered real consolation. While his books were being read, she was immortal. Her soul filled everything he had ever written. Yes, every word and every space between them, every chapter, every paragraph, every sentence, every clause and phrase, every comma, every semi-colon – and he liked semi-colons - every full-stop and every header and footer contained elements of her. And Tommy understood that when his book sales began to falter, so did the memories of her. He had expected it - after all, 50 years had passed. And the years between? Had he really filled them with the promise of his youth or were those years just a dream?
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