(Alain de Botton once said, ‘Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved’. It is through the first love I have awaken for the first time.)
In that warm and salty afternoon,
I have found out lips were so tender,
He might feel the same way about mine.
Kissing is a sacred love language,
Under the drunken twilight, that were spoken in that rose garden within the campus.
Little comments about how are my hands felt were remembered and pouted upon.
Photos of us talking and looking at each other were taken in stealth by a teasing classmate.
Ponytail girl dressed in the pink hoodie was spoiled in love.
Hormones may sparkle at its highest,
But without being openly acknowledged, it remains tickled.
Being stopped in the teaching building staircase, you have expected all the early morning to get my making a face at you.
Love at its first, trembling with your hand, you started to feel a bit down when could not catch up with my footsteps.
And I got carried away in that windy night and forgot to ask you if it’s the cold weather or to slow myself down.
Someone being the first love,
Who holds the key to my underwater world.
One should expect that there is no sea without the sharks.
And the sea itself only to find out with the first ripples of blood.
I guess without the first sailor,
The peace and calm would make no one’s day.
The silent fierce tide would swallow no one.
I am sorry, my love.
I did not mean to.
I am sorry, my love.
Part of me was buried with you.
(Now years later, thousand of miles away, you are safe and sound with your new family. And far away in an exotic country, the night with the blurry moon, I think of you.)
~Carol Shi