There is no such thing as a single first crush. That’s the thing no one tells you. Every one of them—each flutter, each moment of staring too long—is the first until it isn’t. And even then, it lingers. Like steam on a mirror after a bath.
It begins small, usually. A look. An almost-touch. A badly timed laugh.
When I was maybe five, in a town so small you could walk across it in twelve minutes, I fell for a girl who wore bright red boots even on sunny days. Her name doesn’t matter. We were in the same sandbox once. She made a tunnel and I pretended not to watch her do it. I remember the shape of her hands more than her face. She moved with certainty—like she already knew what she was supposed to become.
I remember thinking: I want to be near this. Not own it. Not even hold it. Just near.
That was the beginning.
It wasn’t long before these silent infatuations became a sort of habit. Someone at school who wrote better than me. Someone at the station who waited with a book in hand. Someone who once returned my borrowed pen and added, “You write like you think too much.”
By the time I was seventeen, I had a small diary filled with names I never dared to say out loud. The pages were brittle with time and some sort of unnamed ache. Not quite sadness. More like a longing to be seen fully, even once.
There was one, though—someone who almost turned the crush into something larger.
It was the year I lived in Regensburg. I had taken a gap semester before figuring out what to do with my life, and the city was generous in its confusion. I stayed in a small room above a bakery, the smell of rye and yeast rising every morning like an alarm clock. I spent afternoons wandering cobblestone streets that looked like they remembered more than I did.
That’s where I met her.
She worked at a tea shop two blocks from my place. Dark hair, always tied back, and a voice that made even ordinary words sound considered. She spoke to everyone in the same soft register, as if not to wake some sleeping part of them. I went back for jasmine green I didn’t like just to hear her ask, “And how was this one?”
We spoke maybe ten times.
The last time, she handed me my tea, paused, then added, “You seem like someone who waits for things a little too long.”
She smiled, but it wasn’t pity. It was recognition.
I never went back. Not out of shame. But because she was right. And when someone sees you clearly, it’s either the beginning of something real or a sign to move on.
Years passed. There were others.
A classmate in London who drew stars in her margins. A street musician in Ljubljana with eyes like November. A stranger on a ferry in Nagasaki who gave me a boiled egg and said, “Even birds must land.”
All of them first crushes. All of them last.
And still, they kept arriving.
I used to think it meant I was broken—this way of loving briefly, silently, from the edge of things. But I’ve come to believe it’s simply one way the heart tries to stay awake.
Because eventually, something changes.
You meet someone and they don’t just shimmer—they stay.
They ask the second question. They listen without looking at their phone. They remember the exact way you stir your coffee.
It happened to me once.
I was in Bern. Midwinter. The streets were quiet in that holy kind of way snow makes everything hush. I had just finished a shift at the gallery where I interned. Cold fingers. Full heart. And then, at the tram stop, a voice: “Do you think silence means the same thing in every language?”
That was her first sentence to me.
She had a mole on her left wrist and the habit of saying, “Unfold that thought for me,” instead of “Tell me more.”
With her, it wasn’t electricity. It was warmth.
And warmth, I learned, goes deeper.
But this isn’t about her.
This is about all the firsts.
The girl with the red boots. The tea shop in Regensburg. The ferry in Nagasaki.
And the quiet moment on a bench in the Berner Oberland where I realized something:
None of it had to last to matter.
These people—these ghosts of almost-love—they carved something into me. Patience. Wonder. The ability to sit with longing without demanding it become anything else.
There’s a lesson in that. One I only understand now, looking back.
That a crush is not about possession. It’s about recognition.
Seeing something beautiful in someone else and allowing it to stay beautiful without needing to hold it.
I think of the boy in Krakow. The girl in the train to Split who fell asleep on my shoulder without apology. The bookstore clerk in Aso who laughed too hard at my bad Japanese.
They are part of me. Not in the way lovers are. In the way landscapes are.
You pass through them. They shape you. And when you leave, you carry their weather in your bones.
And so, I return to the beginning.
There is no such thing as a single first crush.
Every time the heart opens, even a little, it feels like a miracle.
And maybe it is.
Not because it lasts.
But because you let it happen at all.
—
Wabi-sabi lesson:
Nothing incomplete is worthless. No brief encounter is meaningless.
To see beauty and not try to claim it is a quiet strength.
And sometimes, the best part of falling is the knowing—you’re still capable of feeling that much.
Even if it doesn’t become a story.
Even if all it leaves you with is the memory of red boots on a dry summer day.
And a name you never said aloud.
life 