She held my hand. I looked away. It had been four years since we had broken up. She cried a little. Just like that, the buzz of the coffee shop faded away. We weren’t supposed to be here.
“He isn’t like you,” she said, of her new boyfriend. I refused to touch her. But I didn’t pull away my hand. “Why did you agree to meet me, then?” she asked, to which I had no answer. I never had an answer the previous year when I kissed her cheek, or the time before that, when I held her and asked her to go away. Yet, here I was, once again, inexplicably, against all logic and delusions of self-worth, unable to let go. Still searching for our lost world.
She was my first, and I was her first, and we only remembered the goodness and reverie, conveniently omitting all the ugliness it enveloped. There was an unfathomable pull, an invisible lasso that had us rebounding back to each other, like two abused souls incapable of growing up without falling down.
Familiarity had become a drug we kept relapsing on.
We were in exalted cinematic company. The concept of first love, irrespective of its volatile tremors, has long been positioned as an inescapable, unhealthy one — entrapment by violent chains rather than bouncy hula-hoops. The first number you drunk-dial belongs to the last person you belong with.
Alizeh (Anushka Sharma, in Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil ) gravitates back towards Ali (Fawad Khan), despite being let down repeatedly. She had loved him enough to hate him. They were perhaps together in their formative years, navigating the dizzy highs and crippling lows of kiddie-companionship together; the bond formed here is more than just an emotional one: it compresses an entire snapshot of time, with all its sights, sounds, touches, smells and frustrations, into a nostalgic postcard of great loss.
“Getting over” someone isn’t so much about the individuals as it is about the phase of life they occupy. No matter how stunted our growth, they represent the birth of a powerful feeling hitherto untapped and impossible to recycle.
Alizeh, just like you and me, has had an unfortunate epiphany: one falls in love for the first time only once. And, for better or worse, it will be remembered. It becomes the epicentre of our core persona, and the aftershocks are felt far and wide, deep into life — often even with the same person.
In long-term partnerships, if one reminisces about the heady beginning, memories assume the distance of a different lifetime, a separate equation with fonder faces. Everything that follows is reluctant evolution: time-respecting sequels to the original. Subsequent connections won’t ever radiate that novelty, or incite that barreling addictive-trigger reaction.
We spend our youth trying to — and then get disillusioned by failing to — relocate that virginal excitement, the giddiness of free-falling into an alien void. They feel like mumble-core montages even as they unfold, shot with a handheld camera with plenty of giggly rambling and lens flares: a “look” captured perceptively by Drake Doromus in his indie drama, Like Crazy (2011).
Jacob (the late Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones), after spending a magical summer together, are torn apart by a visa-induced long-distance relationship. Often, we see one of them mulling silently, possibly wondering if the other thinks their connection is worth fighting for.
Jacob moves on to his next, Samantha (Jennifer Lawrence), hoping to complete what Anna and he started — instead of hoping to start all over again. Ditto for Anna, who dates Simon (Charlie Bewley), but can’t get over the fact that they didn’t end on their own terms. The “I miss you” almost-texts flow back and forth, and again, they are pulled back together misguided by nostalgia.
Most of us have also been Simons, Samanthas and Sabas (Aishwarya Rai, in ADHM ) at some point, too, watching haplessly as we’re made to feel like pretenders instead of successors.
The debris left in the wake of these all-consuming tornados of first-ness pile up: Finn (from Alfonso Cuaron’s Great Expectations ) spends half a lifetime chasing that first kiss with Estella at the water fountain, stomping over his well-wishers on this road to immortality.
But when he holds her hand at the end, as weathered adults and not young fools anymore, he does it out of hope that – if not his art and achievements and stature – perhaps his touch, the most individualistic form of intimacy, will revive old passions. She may have found many men better than him, but her first — their first — sensation is never reproduced. Ali, too, first reaches for Alizeh’s hand before asking her to reconsider them. When nothing more can be done, raw physicality becomes a lover’s last resort.
Similarly, in the intricately detailed French drama, Blue is the Warmest Colour , young Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulus), after cheating on her partner Emma (Léa Seydoux), soon finds it impossible to exist independently of their companionship. She feels like nothing on her own, having outgrown her adolescence with Emma: still in her “Will I ever find anyone else?” phase, miles away from the “What was I thinking?” phase.
When her tearful pleading fails, even after Emma has moved on, Adèle touches her under a restaurant table. She uses her fingers to achieve what her words cannot. There’s such an air of desperation about her move, a beggarly sadness in the way she watches Emma squirm, hoping against hope that her sexual prowess — the cornerstone of their once-torrid chemistry — becomes the clincher. But Emma pushes her away, despite familiar wafts of an intoxicating past.
Intimacy becomes a last-ditch device in Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea , too, when an estranged ex-wife (Michelle Williams) bumps into a self-flagellating loner (Casey Affleck) in a parking lot. She had blamed him bitterly for their kids’ accidental deaths, but the broken man she sees here is a pale shadow of the rakish husband she once adored. She has remarried, but is momentarily swept away by the sentimentality of her life’s most seminal event. Williams’ face is a storm of sympathy and guilt, as if she were attending his funeral while he is alive. And, as soon as she pushes herself onto him, racked with longing, he resists weakly and then recoils — in the knowledge that if they embrace wholeheartedly, there is no way forward. And no way back.
In the last scene of Like Crazy , finally in the shower with each other just like the ‘old days,’ Jacob and Anna go silent. Their spirits are tired. They quietly realize, as two naked strangers together, something most do after leaving a trail of destruction in their selfish quest to reignite old flames: “Now what ?”
Closure is not a luxury many can afford. The pressure of battle will keep them together, though the romance has long been extinguished. Their puppy love is now a conflicted child forced to divide itself between divorced parents.
That day at the coffee shop, I let her hug me. Just about enough to cultivate my resistance and pull away. It was the only way I’d know that we were done, that we just weren’t meant to be.
Somewhere along the way, I had gone from being captivated to being held captive. I didn’t want a belated shower to tell me that. And it was perhaps the only way she’d retain the turbulent essence of being my first.
The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller
