First love

“Don’t look at the name, look at the face. You won’t recognize the name, but look deeply into the eyes. You will recognize them,” I am about to write to my first love, a boy who broke my heart more than twenty years ago. I was fifteen, Roberto was seventeen going on thirty… He called me his “baby” and I was… He took me on a fancy yacht that sailed from Lausanne to Evian in France, just for dinner. Dressed up, we sat on the deck at a round table shared with couples twice our age, sipping champagne as though it were something we did every night. Yes, an evening cruise to France for dinner, just the two of us...

We were in love, and of course that meant forever. Shoeboxes in my closet quickly filled with letters from him. I would sit on the floor of my closet, pulling letter after letter out of the box, not so much to read his effusively devoted words as to clasp them to my nose, my heart, until I was sure I could feel him sitting beside me. I was impervious to the objections raised by my Jewish grandfather… I was sure, true love could overcome all hurdles, break down all boundaries, and cross all lines of religion and race.

A mere four months later, he had found himself a real woman, one whom he could take to bed, a place his fifteen year old “baby” could not even imagine going. And that was it. Over. I knew from the first few seconds of our phone conversation that something had changed. “I have a new girlfriend, from Panama,” he told me. “A real woman.” There was no place or time for negotiation. That was it. I called him back a few days later, sobbing, when the reality finally sunk in and the shock wore off. He was drunk and pretended not to recognize my voice.

Fast forward twenty three years. The betrayal and anguish have become simply threads in the tapestry of my life, woven together with threads of great love, bliss, maturity and development. Hindsight’s 20/20 vision has enabled me to see the obvious shallowness and immaturity, albeit very real intensity, of the love I felt at fifteen. Those four months have become one of thousands of brush strokes upon the painting of my thirty-eight years, barely noticeable amidst the solid background of peaceful contentment with flourishes of deep gratitude, understanding, wisdom and joy.

Enter facebook …I type in “Roberto Silvo, Panama.” There he is. The picture is too small to recognize, for it’s of a man standing in a mountainous panorama. I dare not invite him to be my “friend.”… I send a message. “Are you the same Roberto Silvo who went to ITC in Switzerland and the Hun boarding school of New Jersey.” The answer comes back… “Yes, that’s me. But I’m a little fuzzy on you. Did you go to Hun?” I have changed my name… moved to India, and taken vows of renunciation…

The urge to respond is strong. Nearly irresistible. I want, for some inexplicable reason, to have him “face to face” again… I realize that the urge is… to be fifteen years old, dancing in a dark room in a quaint village of Switzerland, at a time when the greatest concerns were whether to choose badminton or tennis for the afternoon activity… The urge is, of course, impossible to fulfill. Life either moves forward or it stagnates in the past … I stood up, off the carpeted floor of the closet in my parents’ home, and brushed myself off more than twenty years ago. It is senseless to try to squeeze my thirty-eight year old being back into a closet sized for a heartbroken teenager. I do not respond to his message which asks who I am. The curtain has dropped and life has moved forward.”

~ Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswatiji, Ph.D was raised in an American family in Hollywood, California and graduated from Stanford University. She was completing her Ph.D. when she left America in 1996 to come and live permanently at Parmarth Niketan Ashram in Rishikesh, India. She has been living there for the last twenty years, engaged in spiritual practice and dedicated service. She was officially initiated into the order of Sanyas (monastic renunciation) in the year 2000, by her Guru, His Holiness Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji.