Prompt #1

1. Tell the story about the first time in your life when you realized there was such thing as love.

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I think the first time I realized there was such a thing as love is when I got my heart broken for the first time. I know it sounds lame, but when you feel something like that... there is this feeling that anything is possible. And not in a good way. There is this possibility that you can feel death without actually dying. It's a feeling I would never wish on someone else.

The Back story: I fell in love with someone who died. It was the summer before our first year in college. This person was driving with their brother and got into a car accident. It was no one's fault. Secretly though... I pretended it was mine. At the time I didn't want the death to be some cosmic incident that just happened. It was way too important to just compare it to the sun setting, rain falling, grass growing or some other dumb everyday preliminary action. If I didn't love this person. Then maybe, somehow in the grand scheme of things, they would have never gotten into the car. And they would still be alive. For the longest time I began to blame everything on myself. I would much rather things be my fault than someone else's.

So... thats when I realized there was such thing as love. When it was taken away. The shift in happiness is too much to explain and unbearable to experience.

-XxX

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There's this part in Closer (Patrick Marber) where Alice says that no one really "falls in love". You choose to be in love. There's a moment where you can allow yourself to love someone and sort of submerse yourself in them or you can put your guard up and choose distance.

Well, I've never allowed myself to fall in love with anyone. I just can't do it. And it's not that I've never experienced that pivotal moment-- I have. Like clockwork. I know when it's coming. I know when it's arrived and I know when to turn away.

So, yeah, I guess I know it exists. But I also know that I'm not involved with it.
-Anon

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I first realized there was such a thing as love the summer after my freshman year of high school. It was in the winter musical, though, when the story begins. I got into the musical, and was excited being a freshman that I got in. But there was another freshman who got a principal role, and at first I was a little disheartened that my achievement paled in comparison to his. But at the first day of rehearsal, when I saw him, there was some instant connection, and any animosity or jealousy quickly evaporated. Long story short, I began hanging out with him and his close friends (there were three others that made up the group, plus me and him, and we were the only freshman, the rest were seniors), and by the summer the four (one of the seniors was a semi-member of the group, if you will) of us were practically inseparable. But whatever this connection that I felt when I first saw this other boy was, it manifested itself into this foreign emotion or feeling, and by the end of the summer, our relationship was riddled with competition and the accompanying rival-distain that often comes with it (sub-conscious, but all too real), sexual tension, and forbidden mutual feelings that neither of us acknowledged. There was a longing I felt for this person, and an elation I felt when we were together that I'd never experienced before. Our relationship that summer made me question and confront, among other things, my sexuality, an issue that I still deal with today. He moved across the country that Christmas, and I've only seen him one time since then.

There is much more to the story of our relationship and the story of that summer, but that New Years, only a week or so after he exited my life, I began a relationship with a girl, my first girlfriend. The feelings I had for her were very strong, and even though the relationship lasted only a short while, in the middle of it, I thought I loved her. A few months after I broke up with her (she was PSYCHOTIC, still is, and I feel ashamed whenever I think I actually like her hahaha), and I had done some self-reflection and personal examination, I realized that I never loved her at all. But those same twisted feelings I had for the boy persisted within me through all that, and I realized that love is not the cliched happiness I mistook it for in my relationship with my first girlfriend, but that love is the complicated, socially dismissed, confusing, sometimes unpleasant, yet unyielding emotions I have towards this boy. And despite everything I've been through since he moved away, both concerning him and the rest of my life, I still feel very strongly for him, not in a longing way, but just in a..... I guess just that he has left such a mark on me and who I am that I will never forget him. I've only felt feelings that came close to those one other time in a relationship that was/is equally as confusing/frustrating/heartbreaking/elating as his, and this new relationship is also yet unresolved.

In short, my first encounter with love was one filled more with pain, in a sense, or confusion, than joy, and I only hope my experiences thus far in my life have not scarred me for my future.

-A Male Cast Member

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It was when I was forgiven. Everyone has the story about the first lie they told their parents and shit like that. This one was just plain awful.

My friend (who just liked to drink and get high at the time) kept calling me asking me to hang out. I was a good little christian boy at the time and didn't want anything to do with it (I have long sense changed my ways... and me and this friend actually get a long very well... drinking and smoking... funny how that works). So one day she called me and I had no excuse not to hang out with her. so I told her that I had to go to my cousins funeral in south bend. I told her he died in a drunk car crash. Which was true... only it happened about two years ago.

She was the nicest person ever and was very supportive and told me she would be there for me whenever I needed.

I felt like the dirtiest person in the entire world.

So... a week goes by and everything is going great.

Then I get a call from my sister saying she needs to talk to me.

My sister was the maid of honor in her friends wedding.

My friends mother was getting remarried.

In the exact same place at the exact same time.

They ran into each other and my friend was asking my sister about my cousins.

Thats why My sister called me.

She asked my parents about it.

Out of concern. She was worried that something happened and she didn't hear about it.

I explained the situation to my sister and my parents.

But I stretched the truth... again...

I told them that She called me one night when she was drunk and I told her I didn't like drinking and told her that my cousin died in a drunk car accident.

I went on to explain to them that she must have misunderstood me because she was so drunk.

I was flooded with tears at this point.

Not out of sadness.

Out of an overwhelming sensation that I no longer had control over my life.

My parents thought I was the good little boy of whom I painted the picture of.

And my friend was plain confused.

I called my friend up two weeks later and told her we needed to talk.

Needless to say.

She agreed.

I went over to her house. Parked in driveway.

We talked.

for 3 hours.

Smoked a pack of cigarettes and a joint.

At the end of the conversation she just looked at me and goes

Is that everything?

I told her back.

I think so.

She just nodded her head and said.

Okay.

Okay?

Okay.

She looked up at me again.

I just said.

Okay.

She kissed me and got out of my car.

For someone to forgive me for all the awful things I have done to them... that's love.

-Your lying and deceitful Director

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I have always believed passionately that love exists. I have quested for as long as I can remember to achieve love, to be in love.

I always thought it was unfair: I care about love and about loving as much or more than anyone else I know, but others found it and I didn't. I consoled myself to think that my expectations were too high or that others were settling. In moments of doubt, I thought that maybe the poets and saints were writing about an imagined, not a realized love. That love songs were about the same fantasy love I wished for alone late at night, not about the actual love of two regular people.

And then, finally, I found it. Attraction and friendship became intimacy and trust. Intimacy and trust and exposure became love. I knew that love existed, as a fact and not just as a belief, when I was afraid to open my mouth because I knew that "I love you" was the translation of my every sentence. I knew love existed when every moment of my day was a detail I wanted to share, when I was hurt by the smallest neglect, when just eating dinner together felt like the most romantic moment I had every experienced. I knew love existed when I could watch a romantic comedy with a friend, and dream of nothing but touching my boyfriend's skin and giving him a goodnight kiss.

The real thing is raw and volatile and apologetic and frantic and warm and adventurous and domestic and sweet. I am in love, real true love, for the first time ever. It's the first thing that I think about when I wake up, and the last that I dream about as I fall asleep.

I knew love was real when I stayed up all night just to be with my boyfriend, because the day wasn't enough for us, and when we fell asleep clasped together and massaging and smiling early the next morning.

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The first time I ever witnessed true love it was a very painful thing for me.

On Christmas, when I was 15, my family went to Mexico for our family vacation. We left the house and my dog to my dad's brother, my Uncle Philip. As much as I love my Uncle, it is a well known fact to just about everybody that knows him that he is an absolute mess. He is a recovering alcoholic, drug addict, and bulimic, and is completely wrecked financially. There are many reasons as to why he is like this but the most simple explanation would be that my grandmother completely fucked him up as a child. She was so judgmental of him (something she doesn't hold back on her grandchildren either) that he strove to impress her and ended up hating himself in the process.

When we left my Uncle at the house on Christmas he was in pretty decent shape. He hadn't been drinking for a few months and seemed to have a handle on life for the most part. When we returned however it was a totally different story.

We pulled into the driveway and saw that my uncles car was burried in snow, obviously it hadn't moved in a few day. When we went into my house the place was trashed. My uncle had torn the house apart searching for the liquor cabinent and once he found it, had proceeded to drink and drink and drink, his end goal being to drink until he died of alcohol poisoning. Fortunately for us he didn't succeed. We found him passed out in our upstairs guest room surrounded by liquor bottles.

My dad picked up my uncle and carried him into the bathroom where he proceeded to put him in the shower while my uncle cried and blubbered into my dad's shoulder. I sat on the bathroom floor with my dad while my uncle sat under the streaming water trying to sober up. My dad was very quiet but I knew he wasn't mad. He was scared, he was worried, but he wasn't mad. My uncle, who my dad had bailed out so many times, was falling back under. I realized true love in this terrifying moment because I knew my dad would always do whatever it took to help his brother stay alive and get better. No matter how many times he had to put him in the shower or bail him out of debt, my dad would always be there for my uncle. That to me is true love.

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I believe it was mentioned before, that there is this given idea of love that we are supposed to have and expect to come into our lives. Almost every movie, book, and song talks about the type of love we are suppose to have. As for that type of love, no I have never experienced it. I want it. But it just hasn't come. Will it? I don't know, I hope so, but what girl wouldn't?

As for another type of love, I have experienced the love of yearning. I think I have always been so caught up with trying to find, make the aforementioned love, that I missed out on some other types of love. But by tying so hard to find that storybook love, I got a love of some other kind, yearning for someone.

I had known this boy for a while, each year we spend two to four weeks together on a ranch, at camp. It started when I was 13, he was 15. The friendly banter started to get more sarcastic ad hold under tones of something else. I started to see attractiveness out of what I used to see as a weird boy. For years this crush continued. The occasional conversation over the Internet during the school year only helped forward my crush. During the summers I would work out more ways to be around him, he never seemed to mind my company; we'd have long conversations about the future as we play poker (a game he taught me).

Then one summer, I was 15, he was 17. I was determined to make my feelings into something more real. We each kept up our games, so I figured things between us were still mutual. By this year, he had reached the level of staff, and I was a senior camper, which gave me special freedoms. I kept hoping that one night we would go for a walk into the summer night and finally be real with each other, express those feelings that I had for him for years. But it never happened. On the last day of camp, I found out that my counselor friend, who had been my confidant that summer, had given my crush his first BJ on their day-off together. That instant I think I felt a piece of me shatter. I was young, but I had cared deeply for this boy, and hoped for his care in return. I had yearned for his attention for years. And all of it was gone with one BJ.

I will never forget the feelings I had for that boy, and how those feelings ended. Although it wasn't the love you read about in books, it was a type of love that I will always keep close.