First Love

I was sitting on my couch, one year and three months into the best relationship of my life. Whispers about love, marriage, and commitment floated through my head. As I began pondering the idea of love my mind drifted off into haze and I was brought back to that first glimpse of love I found in fourth grade.
“I’m eighty percent British, and twenty percent American,” he argued with the teacher. She smiled and said, “Dustin, your half British, half American.” His red hair caught my attention, next the sweet smile that spread across his face, lastly I saw his eyes. He looked at me and I was held captive. For the next three years I would love no other boy but him. It was that first love, that first perfect boy to whom all others shall be compared.
Dustin Martinson. He had bright red hair, freckles, and the most beautiful eyes in the world. Those eyes held the secret to his magic. When they looked at me and smiled, their warmth lasted for days. I was held in a trance for the next week walking in a daze unable to see anything past that smile. I never knew what made me fall for him. Why had this sweet, slightly dorky, very intelligent boy, captured me?
Dustin from the very beginning knew what he wanted to do with his life. He was going to be a director. And he would be supported through that and every dream he had, by a mother who was his shadow. To a child whose own mother felt more like her shadow at noon, I was awed. The idea of a mother who was always there: from class aide in 4th grade, to lunch in aide in 6th, to his teacher in the 7th. He spent his whole life in the sanctity of white middle class suburbia. Me, I had spent my life detesting all that it stood for. We were opposites in every way possible. At that age little got in the way of love. He had the capacity to make me smile for weeks. He had the power to make me spend my weekends riding down his street hoping to catch a glimpse of his sweet smile.
My haze cleared and I was brought back to reality with the turning of the door knob. There came that same power. He looked at me and smiled, his eyes reached out and hugged me. The smile encircled me in his love. His pale face, and beautiful green eyes, his passion for film, his tranquil childhood filled with protective parents, and middle class suburbia. That love I had once known as a child stood fleshed out, and grown up in a new body. The love that once had me riding by his house to glimpse him, now brought me through the front door and introduced me as the girl he loved to his parents. He was in everyway that first love. The love that once had me sitting aimlessly writing TL + DM… TL + DM…. now transformed into endless lines of love…. TL + GB… TL+ GB….. TL + GB FOREVER…..