Hometown memories

While traveling back to visit my family yesterday, I suddenly realized why I've been so emotional over the past few days.  It's because I'm coming back to my hometown AND it's it's the first time I'm back as a single girl.

I can't remember the last time I was was home for the holidays and single.

Actually, I do.

I used to come home from college/grad school and subconsciously look for him.  My first love.  I would anxiously and hopefully to run into him.  And I constantly wondered if he was around or nearby.  Whenever friends of ours (especially his) would invite me out, I would go out with them hoping that by chance I could hear some news about him.  I fantasized about the possibility of running into him by accident. Or even better, I dreamed of possibly attending the same social event as him.

In the house that I grew up in,  I would also be surrounded by old memorabilia from high school, like old diaries during those years, as well as gifts and pictures from the last part of my high school years. It set the scene for ultimate nostalgia as I would reminisce about my first relationship and how I used to feel and what I used to do when I would come home to see (my family and) him.

If I could capture my first love with a romantic movie, I would say it is the beginning and end scene from  Love Actually:




Most meaningful to me are these airport scene(s) when people who love each other reunite after traveling afar.  These include parents and their kids, uncles and aunts, grandparents and grandchildren, good friends, and most of all, lovers.  This is my scene. The scene that I often had with my first love! It is what I experienced and looked forward to during the period of long-distance dating we endured during my college years.

I watched Love Actually after our breakup, and I remember crying silently in the movie theatre at the beginning and end of the movie. For me, these airport scenes made me realize that losing my first love was not just saying goodbye to a lover. It was goodbye to a friend, my best friend, and it was goodbye to who I already considered to be my current and also future family member.