My story isn’t a clichéd tale of two girls, two inamoratas, who know nothing but happiness. I’m sorry if that’s what you wished for me, I promise I would have liked your version far better than my own. This was never going to have a happily ever after.

She was an artist. I loved to watch her paint, because she seemed more alive somehow. Like all the atoms inside her sparked through her fingertips and landed on the page in a volcanic eruption of motion and color. I thought that I yearned for her talent, and her exuberance, as a soldier craves home. I couldn’t accept for a long time that in reality I just wished for her. I wanted to be the rich red in her paintings, or the reason for the tug of a smile she got on her lips when her mind was far away. She would look at me sometimes, like I was the moon and she the constellations that swathes me in her folds. Then she would touch my hand extemporaneously, and push the hair from my eyes.

I knew she couldn’t feel the same way about me. I read more into our exchanges then I was meant to, but I couldn’t help it. I was falling really, really hard for this girl. I felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, with nothing to hold onto. Falling. Falling. Then suddenly when the tensions built, when I couldn’t pretend that something wasn’t going on between us, I took the plunge, expecting to land in freezing water. I revealed that I liked her. I was performing a magicians concluding act, unsure of whether applause or rejection awaited. I told her I was gay, the first person ever. I was a squirrel cautiously peeking its head from its hole during hibernation, hoping that it wasn’t too soon to venture into the open. I expected her to hate me, for her blue eyes to ice over. I thought she would walk away and never look back. But she didn’t. What she told me transfigured my life forever.

She told me I was brave for opening up. I was a grenade that had just blown up, but instead of leaving destruction in my wake I left hope. Banksy’s grenade. It sounds bizarre, but at the time it was the most bewitching description in the world. She said she knew we were different, but that made her want me. Our differences were what gave her hope, because there could be no yearning in sameness. Opposites attract was her favorite saying.

She was the first person to say it was okay for me to be me. Until then it had felt like I had a chain dragging behind me, shackling me to the wall of a dungeon. The oubliette immured me against my will, forcing me to hide my nature. It was like having the most alluring dream after coming out of an incubus nightmare, where the devil trapped me in his bed. She told me that the way to overcome my fear was to embrace it, and then I would forget to be afraid.

She was right.

We were different, but our contrastive personalities complimented each other. I was sensitive and heedful like a blossom trying to bloom after winter; she was a raging tornado, all intense passion and emotion. Her rage and my peace crashed together to make a flurry of need, longing and fortitude. Our differences completed each other. We completed each other.

Our relationship was fast paced. Based on impulse. We skipped from casual dating to a fully committed relationship within a couple of weeks. She gave me the strength to be open, to creak open my closet door and tell the world who I really was. She made me mettlesome, confident and intensely happy.

Unfortunately she was a closet case lesbian. The clothes on the hangers distorted around her, keeping her trapped in its wooden confines. As I grew into my gayness she became paranoiac about her own sexuality. She would only hold my hand where no one could see, or kiss me in the darkness of the movie theatre. Her fear morphed far beyond expectation, her mind caged by demons only she could see. I tried to help her, but I didn’t know how. She was not willing to embrace her own identity and I couldn’t make her. The friction grew between us as I longed to be open about our love. She was a wilting rose whose petals I was unable to stop from falling. It was Beauty and the Beast, except the Beast’s flower died before she could be redeemed.

I wish I could explain love to you, allow you to share in our emotions. If you could, you would understand why we stayed together, even when my axis started to turn in a different direction. Nothing but love itself can explain love and lovers, just as none but the sun can display the sun. Our sun had pockets of light, and shadows were cradled into slumber. I gave her the potent power to destroy me, and trusted that she would not.

Nine months passed, and still she stayed closeted, keeping me her surreptitious secret. Our differences kept us together, but the fundamental difference of her desire to keep me a secret, and I of wanting to tell the world she was mine tore us apart. Our once blazing conflagration became smaller, until only a small candle remained, waiting to burn our fingers. We exchanged kisses for poisonous words, and smiles for barbed glares. We engaged in machinates, where the loser showed one more bruise. We grew apart, and our love slowly faded like a tune on a swift zephyr. It was as though our hands had never been entwined.

That is such a synoptic and simple explanation for why we ceased to be whole. But I don’t want to explain how the first time I tried to leave her she threatened suicide, or how I lost my faith in a God I had known my entire life, because of my Church’s repudiation of us. I don’t want to explain the times I left the classroom to go to ‘the nurse’s office,’ when in reality I was crying memory tears in a bathroom. You don’t want to know of that pain, and I don’t wish to mark it down. My blood was the ink and my bones the pen. My heart had been purloined by a golden haired Siren. I had bathed in her cool waters, and she was swept away by the tide. We shouldn’t have expected forever, but young love always does. Young love is perpetual.

All of us have been loved into being. All of us have been changed by those angles and demons that we once thought were our future. We have metamorphosed into our truer selves, like a larvae turning into a butterfly. For good or for bad, they have shaped us; have been the potter on the wheel of our lives.

To this day it hurts when I think of my first relationship. About the incertitude and pain of those few months. However I will never forget the joy either, and how she was the flint that created the embers in my heart that became a fire.

She was my first true love. We fell and got broken. But it was all worth it, to have had her in my life. To have felt love for that brief time.

I can remember us with bitterness or with hope. I choose to hope that one day we will both find happiness, or if not happiness, at least some sense of peace. Hopefully my Bansky grenade can blow up once more and bring us both home.