First Love by JL Bogenschneider

Shortlisted in the first Lunate 500 competition

“There is so much to admire in First Love’s arch formalism: a triumph of needlepoint precision that recalls the pained regret of Kazuo Ishiguro. It is a literary Russian doll; within its apparent sparseness is contained a vast swathe of story, with significant plot points (‘My mother and I were on terms’) tossed lightly into play. It would take little work, you imagine, to transform that story into a novel (or, indeed, screenplay.) How the seemingly simple tale of three characters (whose time apart far exceeds their time together) gains its emotional heft through a sensitive and intelligent portrayal of love and loss, is one thing. But its multi-dimensional ambition - the detailed mapping of the narrator’s voice, the cool testing of the illusory nature of memory, a structural ingenuity that heightens the emotional impact - is another thing entirely. It is a joy to showcase writing of the calibre of First Love.”

Lunate editors

***

0

When Suzanne died, I might have been thinking of her. Not of her exactly, but that she was often a part of what I thought about. To divide one from the other would be like separating salt from the sea: possible, but to do so made it not what it was.

Ii
This all happened long ago. I was in love with Annie and she with me. Not that those words were spoken, but: the things that can be communicated without saying. We couldn’t be together, because ours was the love that supposedly dared not, and anyway, we had nowhere to go to dare not. Not until Suzanne, my aunt – who saw it clear – opened up her home so that once a week we studied in the room set aside for guests and thence and hence for me and Annie.

Iii
Not that we were unsupervised, but that Suzanne was subtle. Her sparrow – a wild bird in a cage – alerted us when she approached and we died at the sound of its chirps.

Iiii
But once a week we lived. This all lasted from spring through to autumn, although it felt longer, like if forever had delimitations and only three seasons. After which there came an end.

0

There is an interval between then and now. Our paths diverged. There is no story here.

IIi
I drove back for the funeral. My mother and I were on terms and my wife was in attendance; Annie too, with her own. The wake was at Suzanne’s house and the sparrow was long dead, although the cage remained. Annie did not approach me and I not her, despite that we hadn’t spoken since that last afternoon.

IIii
The young of today with their openness and instancy. Had Annie and I been I and Annie today, we might have analysed matters, perhaps even resolved them at the expense of mystery, although mystery was not a thing I valued then nor is it now. Our room had become a makeshift cloakroom and the bed – the same frame – was slumbered with coats. I slipped in. Occasionally, someone would push at the door and it didn’t matter who it was, but who it wasn’t. The pile of coats shrank and it never was Annie until it was, who had come to collect her own and personal coat, and her wife’s, upon which I sat. We shook hands and she offered her condolences and I like to think we both waited the way we used to wait, at least in a small, needful way.

Annie and I remained unknown to each another, but in the wake of Suzanne, I wondered: about disparity in memory; that what one person meant to another did not always equal what the other meant to the one. This – it appeared, as I sat alone on the bed – seemed painfully and the most likely outcome, because what is first love anyway, but merely and simply the first?