Nobody warns you about loving someone who already had a first love

Akira Xiao 

I think the cruelest thing about being someone’s first love is when they are not yours. Every memory I was making with you felt brand new to me, but familiar to you. I wasn’t jealous of the girl before me as much as I was jealous of the version of you who got to experience all of these things for the first time—with her instead of me.

Twenty-one years of living, I never had a boyfriend before so for every first I imagined belonged to someone I had not yet met. My first hand to hold. My first hoodie to steal. My first morning coffee was made by someone who loved me enough to remember exactly how I liked it.

Then I met you.

But you had already loved someone before me.

Sometimes, when I wear your hoodie, I wonder if she wore it too. Did it smell like you when she borrowed it? Did she smile into the sleeves the way I do? And when you see me wearing it now, do you ever catch a glimpse of her before you remember it’s me?

When we held hands for the first time, I couldn’t stop smiling.

But then another thought quietly followed.

Had your fingers already memorized how to intertwine with someone else’s?

When we squeezed ourselves into a photo booth, laughing as the camera flashed, I wondered if you’d once stood in another booth beside another girl, making another strip of memories that looked just like ours.

When we drank matcha together, I wondered if this café reminded you of somewhere you’d once gone with her.

When you smiled at me with those sparkling eyes, I wondered if they had ever looked at her the same way.

You had no idea these questions lived inside me.

I never asked what your first relationship was like. I never asked about your first love. I was afraid your eyes might soften when you spoke about her. Afraid your smile would carry a kind of nostalgia that had nothing to do with me.

After all, she was your first love.

And first loves have a way of lingering, even when they no longer stay.

So instead, I kept the questions to myself.

Every time you kissed me, I wondered if your lips had learned this tenderness from kissing hers.

Every time your arm found my waist, I wondered if it had once rested around her the same way.

Every time you made me coffee, I caught myself asking whether this was the same cup, the same recipe, the same quiet act of care you had once offered someone else.

It wasn’t that I believed you still loved her. It wasn’t even that I wanted to compete with your past. What hurt was realizing that while I was experiencing everything for the very first time, you weren’t because you already had it with her. For me, every moment felt like stepping into a world I’d never known. For you, some of those moments had already happened.

I hated myself for thinking that way. Because I was the one beside you now. I was the one holding your hand. The one kissing your lips. The one waking up next to you. The past is the past—that’s what I kept telling myself.

So why did it still ache?

Maybe because every first I was having with you had already belonged to someone else before it belonged to me.

And maybe that’s what made me feel so unbearably small.

Not because I wasn’t enough.

But because I kept wondering whether I was simply walking through places your heart had already visited.

So tell me—

When you hold my hand, what feels different?

When you look at me, what do you see that you never saw before?

When you kiss me, when you make me coffee, when you smile until your dimples appear…

What is ours?

Because every first I was having with you, you’d already had yours with her.

I just wanted to know if, somewhere between all those repeated moments, there was something that became a first because it was with me.