Nearly everyone has memories of a former sweetheart. Write your true story of an earlier love, in no more than 700 words. Tell us about someone whose memory brings a smile or a tear, or both. What did she or he mean to you? In particular, how did that person’s presence in your life change you, and what do you still carry with you? Your story may be heart-warming or humorous. Just tell it as if you were talking to a good friend.

I Sing of You

by Patricia Boies

I was still sixteen, a freshman like you, when we met, you who would become my first love, my first lover. I had a crush on you from the start, your thick curly dark hair exploding under the wide brim of your black felt hat, your smooth olive skin that needed no shaving, your crooked front tooth, your long lean body, the battered cane you carried because of your knee operation. I was shy and you were shyer, so even though we spent months hanging out with the gang, my eyes on you as the joint passed and the music played in all those dorm rooms, at all those concerts, even though we hitchhiked from Boston to Ithaca in the middle of winter, huddling close in the phone booth after the state trooper threw us off the highway, it was not until April, spring breaking out all over, that I told your best friend how much I liked you, and he told you, and so it began.

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