I would rather spend two years in a hospital than go through that anguish again! The devouring, emotional, passionate love of adolescence that sinks its claws into you and consumes you day and night and eats into the vitals of your soul! All the self-tortures of doubt and anxiety and imagination and hope and despair that you go through when you are a child, trying to break out of your shell, only to find yourself in the middle of a legion of full-armed emotions against which you have no defense! It is like being flayed alive. No one can go through it twice. This kind of love affair can really happen only once in a man's life. After that he is calloused. He is no longer capable of so many torments. He can suffer, but not from so many matters of no account. After one such crisis he has experience and the possibility of a second time no longer exists, because the secret of the anguish was his own utter guilelessness. He is no longer capable of such complete and absurd surprises. No matter how simple a man may be, the obvious cannot go on astonishing him for ever.
I was introduced to this particular girl by a Catholic priest who came from Cleveland and played shuffleboard in his shirt sleeves without a Roman collar on. He knew everybody on the boat in the first day, and as for me, two days had gone by before I even realized that she was on board. She was travelling with a couple of aunts and the three of them did not mix in with the other passengers very much. They kept to themselves in their three deck chairs and had nothing to do with the gentlemen in tweed caps and glasses who went breezing around and around the promenade deck.
When I first met her I got the impression she was no older than I was. As a matter of fact she was about twice my age: but you could be twice sixteen without being old, as I now realize, sixteen years after then event. She was small and delicate and looked as if she were made out of porcelain. But she had big wide-open California eyes and was not afraid to talk in a voice that was at once ingenuous and independent and had some suggestion of weariness about it as if she habitually stayed up too late at night.
To my dazzled eyes she immediately became the heroine of every novel and I all but flung myself face down on the deck at her feet. She could have put a collar on my neck and led me around from that time forth on the end of a chain. Instead of that I spent my days telling her and her aunts all about my ideals and my ambitions and she in her turn attempted to teach me how to play bridge. And that is the surest proof of her conquest, for I never allowed anyone else to try such a thing as that on me, never! But even she could not succeed in such an enterprise.
We talked. The insatiable wound inside me bled and grew, and I was doing everything I could to make it bleed more. Her perfume and the peculiar smell of the denicotinized cigarettes she smoked followed me everywhere and tortured me in my cabin.
Ah, young love! There's nothing like it. Thank God! That summer blush of passion that makes every waking moment pure ecstasy and agony at the same time. Merton is right. It can only happen once in anyone's lifetime. After that, a person becomes guarded, unwilling to endure it again. To feel too much of something is reserved for young lovers and saints.
I, myself, never really recovered from that time. At moments, I find myself thinking of my first love, and all the turmoil that hurricaned around me that summer. I remember the heat, the need I felt for this person's smell and voice and touch. It was something akin to addiction. Like I couldn't survive without those things. And, at night, I burned in my bedroom thinking about this person's body next to mine.
I know I'm expressing some unsaintly things here, but I don't care. I think there's something very pure about first loves. You go into it with your eyes wide open, not wanting to miss anything. There aren't any barriers to overcome. You don't hold back anything. From before dawn to beyond dusk, you are consumed.
I suppose it's the same with all firsts in your life, though. Your first car--all you want to do is get behind that wheel and . . . drive. First dog--the long walks, hours of fetching and belly scratching. First fireworks--lying on your back, blinded by light and noise. First reading of The Catcher in the Rye--feeling like you've lost and found yourself. It's about obsession, I guess.
I'm sure saints feel the same thing, when they get their first taste of God. Like a cold drink of water after seven years of drought. A thirst you didn't know you had. Overpowering. Either they surrender or live in despair for the rest of their lives.
It is night two of my Star Wars marathon with my daughter. The Empire Strikes Back. Another first for my daughter. She came bouncing down her stairs around 9 p.m. and announced, "C'mon, Daddy." She was the same way with the Harry Potter books and movies when she was younger. Every night, until she was done, full, quenched.
Me? Right now, I'm obsessed with the miracle of this moment, in the middle of a pandemic: me and my daughter on the couch, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
For this, Saint Marty gives thanks.
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