First Love, you only have one!

I got an email from my High School sweetheart today. I'd been trying to track her down for a couple of years, but to no avail. She finally joined Classmates.com, and I was able to send her an email. She responded that she is doing well, married for 9 years, with 3 children, and happy. I don't know why, but I worried about her for many years. She'd had a rough first marriage, and had a few ups and downs in the few years I kept up with her after that. So to find out that she is doing well was like finishing the last chapter of a mystery where the ending resolves and the main characters all end up where they should be. It changed my whole image of where I thought she'd be: homeless, and broken, because things between us hadn't worked out, and she'd made a really tragic life choice that went horribly wrong. She was my first love, and I was absolutely smitten with her. In high school, I was a bit of an ugly duckling, and she, going to another high school, was very popular, and beautiful. I don't know why she dated me in the first place, but she did, for our senior year. We lived 50 miles apart, and being that there was no internet or cell phones back then, I hand wrote her a letter at least every other day, sometimes 4 in a week! She didn't respond quite so often, but I didn't care, I belonged to someone wonderful and pretty and sweet and talented. She was a great artist, and ended up as a graphic artist later after college. I remember that I was listening to "IF" on the Bread's greatest hits 8 track tape, (shut-up, I know!)and writing her my first letter, and coincidentally, she was listening to that same song as she read my first letter, which mentioned that I was listening to that song as I wrote! That was the bond that brought us together immediately. It was a typical first love, and then the typical, "she went to a college out of town, and met someone else the first month" type ending. But despite my hurt, I've held a sweet spot in my heart for her anyway. Unfortunately, that would not be the only time I've encountered that type of ending, but life is what it is, and you move on, hurt for awhile, then thankful when you look back and realize the bigger pain you avoided by tasting the small one now. I'm glad she's doing well, and glad I am too. Dave Nicar