First Loves + Oogway+ Montel= serious life lesions!

My favorite thing to do lately is come home, crack open a beer, sit on my balcony, and reflect on my day.  For some of you, this is something that you do all the time, but for me it’s a rarity and I take great joy on the days my schedule allots me this little dove chocolate commercial moment.  On this particular day, I was sitting pondering life and what I want to be when I grown up when I received a call from a friend whom I haven’t spoken to since I heard via a reliable source (facebook) that he was recently married. 

After we were done sharing pleasantries like, how are you?  any kids yet?  how’s the new ball and chain?,  he tells me he is facing a realization/predicament and wants to know what I think about it.  Now those who know me see this is nothing from the norm as I always receive random phone calls from various people who just need someone who will listen.  Those who don’t may wonder if I perhaps have a counseling or psychology degree.  I assure you all that a BS in history, according to freshman year orientation, was the way to go.

So there I was beer in hand looking at the ducks and turtles swimming in the lake behind my house catching up with an old friend and waiting to see if he was ready to tell me what this new predicament was so I knew whether or not I had time to get another beer.  Four beers later, which according to my calculations was approximately an hour’s worth of conversation time, he finally comes clean.  In college he had a girlfriend who broke his heart.  She started dating someone in a popular campus fraternity and he found out about their relationship one morning as he was pulling an all nighter on campus and he saw the dude coming out of her room.  Now I have heard this story a thousand times in school because before FB we simply had verbal gossip.  Our FB page was our campus cafeteria and we had no choice in who our friends were because there weren’t any “ignore request” buttons.  You just had to be friends with everyone and those who weren’t “friends” per say, still received cordial acknowledgement via the “hey what’s up” nod.

Flash forward years later, my friend married a woman who has put up with years of his shit I’m sure.  He met her on one of his various “business” trips to California.  That being said, his college first love still haunts him.  He admitted to FB stalking her on occasion and said his heart broke again after he saw that she married the same dude who came out of her room that early morning years before.  Although his ex  married her college sweetheart, my friend married someone who will always be his ex’s shadow. 

I spent the rest of the conversation trying to convince him that he made the right choice and he needs to be thankful cause homegirl from college gained way too many pounds and is in desperate need of a touchup in more places than one.  I had to say these mean things #1 because they were true and #2 because first and foremost he is my friend and of course I would be taking his side.

After I got off the phone I sat for another 20 minutes to try and see if I could understand where he was coming from.  By this time it was dark out and I already had a major buzz which really helps in the reflection process because it makes you automatically take ownership of someone else’s problems.  Buzz=the ability to think you are walking in someone else’s shoes.  So while he was probably sleeping and feeling all better about our talk, I sat alone and drunk experiencing his 5 stages of grief.  First was denial: “no way that my friend should be dealing with this bullshit”; second was anger: “dude let it go, we graduated eons ago!”; third was bargaining “well maybe if he told his wife about this, she would understand?”; fourth was depression: “awww this sucks!, how could she have left him for popular dude???? My friend was cool back in the day, no?”; and fifth was acceptance when my husband came outside and asked me why the hell was I outside like an ass “yesss your right hunny…this is not my problem”.

Still thinking about it though, I wonder if there are more people out there who feel this way?  Did we all have a first love that we feel “got away” prematurely?  Are we that love that got away from someone else?  Or are we all with the person who we are meant to be with forever…is there such thing as fate? 

Montel Wiliams used to have a talk show and he would sometimes have episodes where you could go on the show and search for that long lost person.  I used to love watching these particular segments because sometimes you saw two people who were meant to be together become reunited.  Sometimes the ending was good and sometimes bad, but I always remained hopeful until the end. 

I think that there are other reasons we hold on to the ideal of our first love.  Depending on where we are in life, it could be a series of outside factors.  Stevie B sang about a spring love and his details of the day they met seemed reason enough to support the fantasy of it:

I can remember the first time we ever met
The sun was shining
Love was gleaming in the air
You caught my eye and the next thing that I knew
I was in love, I was so in love with you
We were so close for a season of my life
I wanted so much to have you for my wife
But something changed
Season came to an end
I had to leave you
And that's where my heartache began

It sounds so sweet, innocent…before we have kids, before we get stuck in that job we hate, before there are bills that need to get paid every month….there is a moment in time when all is good and happy and if we end up in a relationship at that time then all our memories of those great times become automatically associated with this particular person.  If this is the case and what I think is actually how it is, then I have had many first great loves and they have all gotten away, but I’m a better person for having had them in my life as they all taught me something different.  If I were to go on Montel’s show and seek out these loves, it wouldn’t mean that I would go back to being 16, 18, 21 so on and so forth.  It would mean that this other love and I would have to start in the here and now and we would be two totally different people to each other.  We will never be the person we were back then and if so then woooosaaaahhhh and move on.   Yesterday is History.  Tomorrow is a Mystery. Today is a Gift, that's why
it’s called a Present!  Maybe Ogway from Kung Fu Panda was right in saying that there are no accidents.    Look at himmmmm he even looks wise J

I think it’s the stick lol