First Love

You never forget your first love. It dictates how you love for the rest of your life. I experienced my first love at sixteen. I had dated a few times, but I never had a real boyfriend. Suddenly this new guy comes into my life and makes me feel like the only girl in the world, I fell hard. Most of the kids in the small predominately Hispanic neighborhood of Baldwin Park knew each other, so everyone immediately noticed when Daniel the “new kid” moved in. He stood out for many reasons. Daniel was this 6’2, husky white guy with blondish curly hair. He was like a flash of light in a dark room.

Like most teenagers, at sixteen I felt awkward and lacked confidence in myself. I resembled Popeye’s girlfriend Olive Oil: tall, dark, and skinny. I had more legs than torso and towered over most of the boys in my school. As a result, I didn’t get much attention from them. In my class of 200 students, the girls outnumbered the boys, so all the good looking guys had been snatched. When Daniel came into town, all the single girls vied for his attention. He was tall, confident and charming. It never, ever occurred to me that I would have had a chance with him, ever. It was simply mathematics, I was outnumbered.

During high school, many of us went out in groups. It didn’t take long before he became part of our circle and began hanging out with us on the weekend. Again, I never thought he would be interested in me, so I was extremely flattered when he became flirtatious. At first, I wasn’t sure he liked me. It’s that feeling you get when you’re walking and suddenly someone waves at you, you wonder, is this person waving at me or is someone standing behind me? That’s the same feeling I got When Daniel paid attention to me. I wondered if he was saying hi to me or is there a pretty girl standing right behind me?

One night after a high school football game, we went to Pepe’s, a small, dark, Mexican food dive with red vinyl booths and a large mural depicting a rural Mexican village on the wall. He followed me as I searched for an empy booth and then sat next to me. We huddled in our booth talking and laughing for hours, never noticing how late it was until the owner began flickering the lights alerting us that it was closing time. At the end of the night he asked if he could drive me home, so we jumped into his beat up, old, red 1950’s Chevy pick-up truck. It was a little nerve-racking because the whole ride home I was wondering if he was going to kiss me or if he was politely going to say goodnight. I can tell he was nervous too because he began talking fast and repeating himself. We turned the corner near my house and he began driving slower and talking faster. He parked two houses down from my house. Nervously he looked down and in a soft, sweet voice he began to ask me if he could kiss me, but before he got a chance to finish I leaned in and kissed him. I fell for him at that precise moment.

The first six months of our relationship were bliss. He was attentive, romantic, and funny. However, there was a side to his personality that appeared a little sad and nervous. I always attributed it to his parent’s separation. I actually found it endearing. Things had never been better, so as a young, naïve sixteen-year-old I thought he was my forever guy. But as our relationship progressed, subtle changes in him were surfacing. At first, they were small innocent gestures of jealousy. For instance, he asked me to stop hanging around my friends because he wanted to spend more time with me. It was sweet, and I was flattered “he just wants more time with me,” I thought. He didn’t want to go out in groups anymore. He said he didn’t want me talking to other guys because they may steal me away and he couldn’t live with that. “He really loves me,” I thought.

Those sweet gestures of jealousy soon escalated to complete control of my every movement. We would be in the car and I couldn’t look out the window because he thought I was flirting with the guy in the next lane and that would set off a screaming fight. Soon after I found myself constantly defending my every action. He would pick me up and drop me off at work and school so he knew where I was at every moment of the day. As someone who doesn’t like confrontations, it just seemed easier to avoid doing things that made him question me than to avoid fights. What kept me in that relationship and under his control was the fact those bouts of jealousy were always balanced out with grand gestures of love. I would come home and there were cards filled with words of adoration. Dozens of red roses were constantly delivered to me at work, and one night he even serenaded me outside my window on my birthday. His control never escalated to physical abuse, which is also the reason I justified his behavior, but in retrospect, I realize control is also a form of abuse.

Graduation passed and I started working full time in a medical office. He had enlisted in the Army. We started talking about our future together and as the months went on he started talking more and more about getting married. I kept telling him we were too young and questioned him about why he wanted to rush into marriage. I kept insisting that If we did get married it should be after he got out of the service. However, as the months leading up to his departure grew closer, he began putting more and more pressure on me to marry him before he left. I couldn’t understand why he wanted to elope and rush into marriage. Something in the pit of my stomach hurt every time he mentioned marriage, so I began making up excuses why I couldn’t see him. I dodged the conversation until it was time for him to leave.

A few months after he had left I got a call from Sandra, a mutual friend of ours. She said “Listen, I have to tell you something about Daniel, but you can’t tell him I told you,” that opening statement gave me that same sick feeling in my stomach I got when we talked about marriage, she continued “Daniel had a baby with his ex-girlfriend about a year ago and he’s been keeping it a secret from you”. I was flooded with emotion, anger, sadness, and a sense of betrayal. All this time he had made my life miserable because he was afraid I was going to betray him, when the reality was he was betraying me. Lucky for me, I was not able to talk to him right away because he had been transferred to Germany. It gave me a chance to think about what I was going to say before his next phone call to me. Three weeks later I got a Saturday morning phone call from him. I picked up the phone and softly said, “Hi babe, I’ve been waiting for you to call, I have something to tell you”, a moment of awkward silence before he said “what is it, you can tell me anything, I love you”, “I’m pregnant and it’s not yours” I told him with strength and confidence that I had never been able to muster up before. “What! I can’t believe you cheated on me, you were just waited for me to leave before you started whoring around!”. He was stunned and the name calling, yelling, and crying began. I allowed this to go on for about fifteen minutes before I said to him “Wait! It’s not true, I’m lying to you. I’m not pregnant. I just wanted you to feel for five-minutes what I felt when I found out you had a baby with someone else” (silence.) He had nothing to say, but I’m sorry. After that day, I never spoke to him again.