They say that you never forget your first love. And whoever ‘they’ are, they’re right. My first love was a boy I had met in the year of 2007, my first year in high school, not him. It should’ve been him, it could’ve been him, but it wasn’t. Fate just didn’t want it that way. Whenever someone asks about my first love, I’m not sure who I’ll think about first. Is it him or him? That high school boy or the college one? I lean more towards Sehun. I don’t think I really realized that I loved that high school boy until it was too late.

Love can be defined in many different ways. It could be in the whispers of ‘I love you’ or the soft touches of the person you claim to be your other half. It can be felt when you have his arms around you or when he’s laughing and you can’t help but laugh too because he’s happy and here and the moment just seems perfect. What is love, really?

For me, I think I would say that love is something like him. Not exactly like him of course because love wasn’t exactly what I would’ve called it back then and I believe it could truly be called love if I had known during the time, after all I knew that I loved Sehun. You see, love is something perfect, something not real.

Even now, I don’t regret the choice that I made when I fell for him. Because where I would be if I hadn’t? I’d be emotionally stable and never understand the true meaning of loss, love and secrets. I’d be like all the bottle blondes and imbeciles that I had attend school with all those years ago.

He was just about everything I thought that I wanted. Tall, handsome, smart and athletic. No one else in the world, not even my own best friends, could make me feel the way that he did. But I guess that was his charm, creating the facade of perfect so well that not a single person could see past. To me, he was the shiny, bright city for a country girl who wanted to escape. He was fresh and new, the great. I thought that was everything I had wanted at the time. I just thought I needed somebody to love.

I don’t think I could accurately describe how he felt about me. Maybe he thought I was trouble, but a good kind of trouble. One that was worth it. How great it would be to feel as if I was worth something to someone at one point in my life. Maybe he thought I was everything too and that I was bound to be his from the start, it would explain his arrogance when we met and his inability to let go when I tried to run away from his love. All I know about his feelings were what he told me.. They could easily be lies told in the text messages at night or whispered softly in my ear when we thought no one was watching. But I want to believe that they were true and that he did love me, because somehow, I loved him too.

You’re probably wondering who this boy was. Who could have ever come in to Jung Soojung’s life? What could he possibly do to leave her scarred? What are these lessons he taught her?

Well, here it is.

His name is Kim Jongin. A year above me in terms of grade and I met him through an extra course in literature during the second semester of that first year. Of course, the thing I seemed to like most in the world, writing, would eventually be the end in me. But this isn’t me, this is about us.

Kim Jongin was pure charisma. He had the looks, the charm, the talent. With dark hair that he occasionally bleached this perfect shade of blonde and chocolate brown eyes that made me just melt into them. It wasn’t that hard to fall. We hung out at school a lot, eating lunch and just talking about everything. Whether it be the future, our interests, or just us. The conversations during the day would bleed into texting all the time and late night phone conversations when I was supposedly sleeping.

And then I started feeling it. The extra pitter patter of you heart, the nervousness whenever I was around him, the never ending smiling that would lead to my parents questioning what on earth could make me smile like that. It was him. Kim Jongin had become my world without me knowing it. And before you judge me, just know I had never been in any relationship before and my parents are divorced. I didn’t have the slightest clue what love is. But after he was gone, I think I was finally able to see that it was love.

It was in the next year that we actually took our feelings somewhere. It was obvious that he had liked me from the start, what tenth year sophomore would spend so much time hanging out with a ninth year freshman. It was completely absurd at our school. Unless the sophomore liked the freshman that is. And that just so happened to be the case. Kim Jongin had a crush on me. So it was in my sophomore year that we started something. I think we were dating secretly, like those idols do because they can’t afford to get caught in a scandal. It was the same way for me. I couldn’t afford to lose the good scholarly reputation that I had built for myself throughout all the past years of schooling.

So we started meeting secretly. Anytime we could spare, we’d hide out in the shadows of the field’s bleachers or behind the stage in our performing center. He would be there first and as soon as he would see me, Jongin would wrap me in the arms that I so desperately craved and we would just sit like that, me wrapped up into the safety of his arms, It was like that for a while, And then he kissed me. On the lips. One day he just saw me running up to him in the performing center and he took me in his arms, twirled me around like some romance movie and suddenly his lips were on mine.

I think that was the turning point in our relationship. We started getting serious and he wanted something more from our relationship. I’m not talking , he wasn’t the type to want that kind of stuff. But he started getting clingy, needy. Soojung ah let’s tell people us. Soojung ah give me a kiss. Not that kind! A real one. Soojung ah let’s hang out again today. Soojung ah let’s go to the movies. It was like I couldn’t be enough anymore. But the thing was, the butterflies never stopped. The pitter patter of my heart beat never stopped. I still loved him. I loved him even longer than he lived.

Kim Jongin died on Friday the 19th day of February at 2:48 in Seoul, South Korea. He was driving home from a party and drunk driver had hit him. He died immediately as the car came and crashed into the driver’s side. I never got to say goodbye to him, give him that one goodbye kiss he was always asking for, tell people about us, go out to the movies together. I never got to hear his soothing, rich voice telling me that he loved me. And even now, I hope that he knows that I love him.

After his memorial, his funeral, the entire aftermath of his death, I told myself that love was something that could wait. His death had thrown me over an edge and I just about hit rock bottom in grades, he wasn’t even here to hold me as he screwed my grades over. My mom was extremely worried, she didn’t know we were dating, but she knew how much he had meant to me. I lost the person who I believed to be the love of my cursed life. Maybe some people were just born to be old maids.

I wasn’t the same after he was gone. I spinned out of control for a while, people just thought I was losing a close friend or that maybe I had a crush on him. I don’t know if I regret not telling anyone now. My grades slipped, I stopped talking to most people, I just wanted out and over with life. After all, my life of Kim Jongin was completely over. This is why you can’t let me feel love ever again, because it will break me more than I’ve been broken before and there are only such little fragments you can leave my heart in. You see, the thing about first love is that it is painful. But unrequitable love, the kind that I felt for Sehun, that was heartbreaking.  But like I said, he taught me things, and no matter how many times I feel the tug of a memory, of a longing for him, I regret nothing.