So I’m driving to work and, for a change, I’m actually listening to one of the purveyors of commercial mainstream crap that passes for a South African music radio station these days… When they start playing Justin Bieber. The latest prepubescent (okay, okay, 16-year-old) singing sensation who’s got young girls’ knickers in a knot. And he’s crooning on all “Ohh whooaah whooaah Are we an item? Girl quit playing…” His voice has barely broken but his heart sure has.
I mean, what on earth does this little kid know about love? Shouldn’t he be focusing on passing maths? Or on keeping his skinny jeans at an acceptable mid-butt level? The whole song had me fuming at the state of the world and the music industry and then… suddenly… I remembered my first love.
It was mortifying.
I was 12 years old, in a new school in a new town… Used to daydreaming about being a wildlife explorer and ambling into lampposts with my nose in a storybook. I was shy, and shell-shocked by the sudden intrigue and politics of being the new kid in town. So meeting a family of gung-ho outdoorsy boys, their parents the local vets, was a blessing. Weekends away camping next to the Caledon River, my first horse-riding lesson (not very successful!), late-night marshmallow cremating sessions, using a canoe to toboggan down snow-covered slopes one particularly magical winter, swapping storybooks, spending hours playing Risk… And all the while, getting to like the blue-eyed, blonde brother that was my age. And I mean, really, really like.
And he liked me back. So much so, that his older brother picked up on the vibes and pulled off a prank “will you be my girlfriend” scenario, using pretty paper with a little bear holding a heart-shaped balloon on it. I was incredibly excited and skeptical at the same time – and a phone call to the brother quickly confirmed that my gut-feel was correct: it was just a scam.
I was so angry… And heartbroken.
But then, one weekend, while we were leading some horses by the reins in a field by the riverside (my butt and ego smarting too much from one too many falls), he actually tried asking me to be his girlfriend. It was all very earnest, and my 12-year-old self asked for some grace to… think about it.
So I said no. And then I phoned him and said yes. And then, we spent all of a week walking on opposite sides of the road to and from school, him carrying my bag, me blushing all the way, both of us not speaking a word to each other…
I didn’t really know what I was supposed to DO with a boyfriend. And I missed having my friend around: the boy I could laugh with, who didn’t mind that I wasn’t into girly gossip, walked around barefoot most of the time and couldn’t see further than the book I was reading at any given time.
So we decided to be “just friends”. And the next year, he left for boarding school in a different town… We kept in touch, but often, I wondered if I shouldn’t have done things differently. Maybe figured out what being a “girlfriend” was all about, for starters. And always, I missed my friend.
It’s years later, and sometimes I wish that I could go back to when love was just randomly mortifying and blush inducing, not much more complicated than that. I often think back to how I felt then, and how it physically hurt to like somebody so much – and then, how it totally sucked to actually try and express that like.
We’re still friends, my first love and I. I’m thinking he might either laugh out loud or cringe if he reads this…
I’m also thinking that maybe I’ll give Justin Bieber and his ilk a break. If I could even imagine writing a song about my experiences at that stage, I probably would have done much worse. As it is, I actually wrote poems. Which I can’t yet bring myself to burn, but they serve as a good reminder that melodrama never fades, no matter your age or experience… And that you never, ever experience first love again. So you might as well cherish it when you do…
Tags: boyfriend, Caledon River, Donnay Torr, dustbunniesproject, First love, girlfriend, Justin Bieber, South African radio stations