Innocent Loves

Innocent loves don’t leave you innocent. This becomes clear in the aftermath of every first relationship or, worse, a “situationship,” the latter of which seems to be the dating norm these days. It’s not just your virginity you lose—if that was ever part of it—but your innocence, too, in ways you never expected. The loss comes quietly, indirectly, and lingers deeply. You’ll always question love from then on, never able to look at it with the same eyes.

I speak form experience. You don’t even realize you’ve fallen until, one day, you wake up on the other side of the world, whispering into your phone that you love them. There’s an innocence in the way you say “I love you,” never knowing how heavy those words will sit on your chest ten months later, after the distance stretches between you both.

You try to release the weight, but the harder you push it away, the more it presses back—Newton’s third law, I guess. It presses harder with each promise we made, promises we both knew would never be kept, yet clung to anyway, out of hope, out of need. We built a fragile skeleton of a house out of those promises, in which only I remained, though I was the first to leave.

That’s the thing about first loves—they never really leave you. They come back like ghosts within the year, to kiss you, haunt you, to stir your thoughts, to remind you of what was. He lured me back into that house, more broken than I’d left it, only to abandon me as if to take some sort of revenge for leaving first. I sat in the center of its crumbling foundation, unsure how to leave, unsure if I even could.

The house was never whole; it was a collection of beams, barely holding together, never meant to stand. We sketched walls in the air, talked about rooms that would never be, imagined spaces we could never fill.

I wandered through it for months, feeling the cold emptiness in every gap, each unfinished corner. The kitchen he had dreamed of was nothing more than an idea, lost before it could even take shape. The pictures he clicked—still in their frames—had no walls to cling to anymore. They lay scattered on the ground, their images curling, fading, becoming something distant, unrecognizable.

I didn’t know if I was waiting for him to return or if I was simply watching it all unravel while hurting. Maybe I thought I could finish it, piece by piece, even though the foundation was never strong enough to begin with. I wanted to build those walls, to make the structure whole. But he didn’t want that anymore, and I didn’t have the courage to tear it all down—I still don’t. I’d rather let it decay in some distant, hidden corner of my brain, always a part of me, as promised.

The aftermath of this love feels like a punishment I never deserved. I’m on my knees, pleading to a god I don’t even believe in for sins I never committed. Every time I reached out to him, it hurt more. I wore my heart on my sleeve only for him to slap it away—once, twice. I learned my lesson after that. Successful classical conditioning. The innocence slipped away the moment I stopped trusting love, and I stopped trusting it then. Perhaps that’s the cruelest betrayal of all: What’s left when even love betrays you?

Now, I lie awake at night, bones aching, mind racing with questions I can never ask, questions only he can answer. I find myself scrolling through his profile in the dark, not looking at him but at the new me. He did well, found someone who seems better than me, but of course, I’m not happy for him. It’s not that I want him back—I just hate that I was the one to leave first, yet somehow, I’m the one left hurting, with a love that’s no longer innocent.