Reliving Memories

An interesting question was broached over on Zuluspar's blog.

If you could relive one memory what would it be?

I had to think a bit on this one, it's not an easy question to answer. The more I thought, the more I kept coming back to the same answer.

The first time I fell in love. There's a youthful innocence in that experience that is never quite replicated. It's a newness, a freshness of experience. It's often more positive than losing one's virginity-- which due to fumbling inexperience rarely lives up to one's expectations.

Falling in love for the first time, exceeded my wildest expectations. I thought I'd been in love before, but given the stratospheric highs of the experience, I knew that I'd merely been in lust before. There was something unrivaled about the experience.

We'd worked together at an amusement park for most of the summer, we started spending more and more time together off the clock as well as on the clock. Initially we were both in relationships with people who were absent. People who scarcely wrote, people we were hanging onto our relationships with more out of habit than out of any lingering emotions. When we finally severed our respective ties to our distant others. We both had a sense of freeness that had been missing before. We'd grown so close has friends and there was a certain tension of something more there.

One night we'd fallen asleep in each other's arms, as we awoke our lips were literally mere inches apart. The tension had grown to a fever pitch and eventually our lips touched and I was floored. As far as first kisses went, this had rivaled my first ever kiss and my first kiss with my then recent ex.

We had our ups and downs, but the distance was too much to bear and our lives eventually took us in other directions. Even after we split up our paths crossed a handful of times and on those occasions there was still something their, the vestiges of what we'd shared.

I remember that it took close to a year after she and I split up before I was ready to consider seriously dating anyone again. I casually dated here and there, but I was numb to any potential for more with any of those girls. There were some interests there but I seemed to accidentally on purpose sabotage any potential for anything more each and every time.

While I eventually did love like that again, and I did feel those tremendous highs again-- the next time around I had my guard up. I was in a couple relationships where I loved but wasn't in love and then Cupid's arrow struck again. However that time, because of how things had ended the first time around, as happy as I was, there was always a slight tugging restraint. I never gave her all of myself, even as I was in love with her. It felt too good to be true for me to be in love like that again... I was perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop and in so doing it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And once again I was put in a place where I coasted through life merely going through the motions numb to any real emotion, my guard up my wounds still fresh.

And right about then I started a correspondence via a mutual friend with the woman who eventually became my wife. I guess what they say is true, third time's the charm.

So, your turn. If you could re-live any memory what would it be?