1. Prologue

First loves are painful.

It's almost a universal fact. Let's face it, six billion people in the world, one in a trillion chance that you're going to find your soul mate when you're thirteen or whenever it was that you knew there was a thing called love. I figure it happens sometime in your "teens", thirteen or fourteen seems to be a common age. At least for me it was. Believe me; I went through most of my elementary school years with the myth that all girls possessed cooties or some other contagious disease. I'm sure they thought the same about us boys.

But there's always something different with your first, something you have with them that will never be the same, that can never compare with all your future loves.

Vanessa wasn't my first love, not by a long shot. Alright, so I wasn't a guy that had a lot of experience with girls before Vanessa came along, but that didn't matter, I was still young. But even though she wasn't my first, something about her and about me at that time has stuck with me to this day. I still find my mind wandering back to her on some slow work days, sometimes in the middle of my dreams her smile will appear.

Fine, call me a psychotic freak if you want.

Point is, (and I never quite mastered the art of getting my point across) that besides a first love, there's one more love that stays with you for the rest of your life. Usually it's a turning point in your life, a point in your life where you suddenly stop being the child and be the adult. A point where you wake up, close the door of the life you were leading and open the door to a new life you hope will be better. Most people feel this category is also combined with their first love. Mine wasn't.

I can barely remember who my first love was. Mindy something, when I was thirteen. We went out for about a month and then found we were better off being classmates in high school, which was the common routine for us and our peers. It was a bigger surprise if you and your current beau lasted more than a month.

Anyways I think I'm babbling on like I tend to do. I don't know what good will come out of me writing down my story, if any at all. But sometimes you feel like you have to write something, anything down, get it out of my system so to speak.

I'm here to tell you about me and Vanessa. And what happened between us that we'll never forget.