No Thank You

Hello. Okay. So I’m gonna tell you a story about my first love.

So, when I was seven years old, I remember just being extremely fascinated by this boy in my class. And I didn’t know that it was love, or falling in love at that time—I just remember being extremely fascinated by his green eyes, and his skin, and his hair, and everything about him.

So one day I decided that I wanted to give him something. I don’t know why. I just had the impulse to give him something, something precious.

So I went home, and I looked in my room, and I thought, “What is the most precious thing that I can give him?” And I ended up with this red plastic jewelry. That, for some reason, was the most important thing I owned at that time. And I took it back to school the day after. I had it in my bag, and I decided that I wanted to give it to him in the first break, and so I did.

I remember standing in the window in the classroom, looking down into the yard, and he was playing soccer with the rest of the boys in the class. I was gathering the courage to go down there, and I went down there, and I realized, “Okay, I have to stop him from playing soccer.”

So I just eventually yelled his name, and he came over to me like I was a stranger. I don’t think we had ever spoken to each other before that moment, actually, and I just showed him the jewelry, and I asked, “Do you want this?” And he looked at the jewelry, and then he looked at me, and he was like, “No, thank you.” And he went back to playing soccer. And then yeah, that that was it.

Actually, so the reason why I think I’m telling this story is, or the thing I think is interesting in this story is—I didn’t know what it was at the time. I was just acting on impulses. It’s only now, when I’m an adult, that I can see that it was my first love, and it was my first experience with being let down by love.

And I think that whenever I try to get my head around this existential question about climate change, I end up in a very concrete story, because it’s like reality is too complex in some way. And I—I really don’t want to rationalize too much about this story in this context.

But I think that if there was just one thing that I could take from this story, it is that it leaves me with the feeling that sometimes it’s so much easier to understand something when it’s left behind. When you look back at it. When it’s not there. It’s only now that I understand that this was about my first love.

Yeah. I don’t know.