WRITING PROMPT / FALLING

Reconnecting With Your First Love Might Knock You Off Your Feet

And cause an emotional fall

In 2018, I had an unexpected emotional fall. Like most falls, it was one I never saw coming, or could possibly imagine.

It happened while I was writing my third memoir, Loose Gravel, about when I was a teen in the 1970s when all I wanted was to hear from my boyfriend, Will.

It was the year after my nervous breakdown at fifteen. Will’s family had moved to England, and I was waiting for a letter from him, needing to know he still cared — all the while feeling more and more unloved and alone.

I had thought the memoir I was working on was about a girl breaking the law, losing her virginity, and leaving home. But soon realized it was really about a girl trying to outrun her grief and escape her pain.

Forty-two years later, that boy, Will, now a man, reached out to me on Facebook. And it would take me from the solid ground I’d been standing on to finding myself on loose gravel again and falling down hard.

He’d seen pictures of my younger self on Facebook and wrote,

Hi Barbara! Were you Barbara Langille back in the day? From Oakland?

I was unsure about answering. Unsure to open that closed door.

But I answered, and it began our messaging back and forth.

That night, he bought the e-book Balancing Act — the memoir I’d written about him and how I’d struggled after the end of our relationship.

His reading the book was something I never thought would happen. For him to say he was sorry were words I never thought I’d hear. Our re-connection set off so many emotions and questions of what might have been.

Lost possibilities. Opportunities. And what would never be.

Our texting was so reminiscent of the letters we’d written each other over forty years ago. Our re-connection was filled with moments of joy, laughter, and warmth, but also the pain and the grief I’d never fully dealt with. (Although, until we reconnected, I thought I had.)

I’d been writing about how much I wanted to hear from him. And what a coincidence to have it finally happen.

All my young girl’s feelings were still inside me. It felt like time had stopped.

Yet I was now married 37 years. He was divorced three times and in a long-distance relationship with a Polish woman 18 years his junior. I still lived in Nova Scotia. He was living in the United States. It wasn’t like we could easily be together.

I told my husband I was in contact with him. All was well, but soon wasn’t.

We texted all the time. From the early morning hours to late at night. I wasn’t sleeping well. Overcome with memories and emotions, not understanding that reconnecting with him had triggered grief of another first love.

My very first love would have been my mother. But I had no memory of loving her. What I had was a sense of duty and obligation. I did what was expected of me.

I knew I had built a wall of protection around me. I understood that somewhere in my past, at a very young age, I had to shut my feelings down in order to survive. It had been too painful to accept the fact my mother didn’t always have my best interest in mind.

That energy/emotion of my loss and pain stayed buried deep inside, trapped, waiting for a way out, for a release, like a wound scabbed over, never fully healed.

Communicating with Will ripped that scab off and left me wounded again. The loss of him. The loss of my mother. So connected. So tied together — both first loves, both first losses.

I didn’t know the power a first love held.

I started listening to the music I listened to back then.

Willie Nelson — You Were Always On My Mind Janis Joplin — To Love Somebody Gordon Lightfoot — Early Morning Rain

All those old feelings came back like I was still there. Feelings I never thought I’d experience again.

I had an ache in my gut non-stop. I wanted to drink again. After 30 years of sobriety, I wanted to get drunk. Wanted to stop the never-ending thoughts and feelings.

Reconnecting with Will shook my marriage and the thought of tossing it all away. I feared what I could do. What that desperate young girl inside me wanted.

I searched online to learn more about reconnecting with a first love. Learned your first love is part of who you are. Who you were. Who you thought you’d become.

That it’s hard to let go of your first love. Emotional memories are more strongly encoded in the brain.

I felt I was fighting a powerful addiction. Or under a spell.

I cried like I’d not cried since I’d been young. Tears from deep inside. Tears I’d not shed when my 90-year-old mother died in 2016. Now, two years later, it was as if I mourned a loss I did not know was ever there.

Part of me understood, somewhere inside me, there had to be grief for my mother. Another part understood I’d lost her when still a child. She had been alive, yet dead, unable to love me as a mother should love her child.

I knew it was time to enter therapy again. I gathered a list of names covered by my workplace insurance and searched websites for more information on them.

Christine Fall-Moore was the psychologist I chose because of her description of herself and her therapy style. Her name, Fall-Moore, also symbolic of what I was going through.

Falling once more. Losing control. My life falling apart.

There are so many stories about this time in my life, but I am still too close to it to write fully about it. I need more time and distance until I can tell all.

For now, just know if you ever reconnect with a first love, you might fall like you never thought you could fall.