I don’t really know what my first love was. I think I started to fall in love with things fast and furiously from a young age. Jonathon Taylor Thomas might have been up there. Devon Sawa as Casper the Ghost wasn’t far behind. Heath Ledger forever. There was a boy at my primary school who was unscrupulously violent, but also had a mushroom-shaped blonde haircut so I was desperate to confirm he knew I was alive. The packets of chicken-y salt inside Maggi noodles stole my heart early. Low rise stretch pants. Every character in The Saddle Club. I truly loved all these things. Love and yearning. Love and wanting. Love and hunger. Back then, it was all one and the same. 

I suppose my traditionally recognised first love was with a teenage boy (I know, so unoriginal, yuck). It was a hallmark first love story really. In the sense that I was more or less loved back, and it was one of those inevitable high school heartbreaks. You know the kind. The bad(ish) boy and stumbling girl caught a riptide. 

If my first love story were an American movie it would be set between a football field and a halloween party. He would win championship trophies, and wink at her in the bleachers. She would stand tucked in beside him, while he chugged beer and crushed red cups. She would cry and slap his chest when they fought, and sleep on it when they didn’t. He would teach her to drive, badly. She would send him really long text messages from her pink flip Motorola (which is actually quite hard to do and arguably an undervalued skill). He would throw pebbles at her boarding school window. They would fight. They would forgive. And eventually, after very very (very) many Matchbox Twenty songs, they would go their separate ways. In the Hollywood version, naturally they would go off to different colleges. But in Australia (and reality) we went to the only two places two Queensland kids could affordably go when they wanted to feel like they were growing up. Sydney and Melbourne. 

To paraphrase another great love of mine, Miss Josephine Potter from Season 6 Episode 24, of course that isn’t exactly what happened but it’s exactly how it felt. Like tears on tank tops, feet on dashboards, radio on soft rock, and vodka cruisers on a summer day. Now I know you won’t believe me, but I am actually not a crazy person for remembering the essence of my first love so vividly (which, honestly, was a relief to me too when I read up on it a bit). In fact, you probably do too. (Admit it, because otherwise it means you don’t believe in science ya’ dinosaur).

To continue paraphrasing people, but this time cognitive scientists from basically everywhere, first loves are infuriatingly programmed to have an asteroid level impact on our development. They have a catastrophic influence over our ongoing understanding of love. Can you believe that? What an absolute scam. Imagine telling Frida, Picasso, or (dare I say) the other Matisse, “no matter how much you master the brush, I must inform you, deep down you will forever be shaped by your earlier finger-painting work”. I mean, the gall. What chance do we have.

According to a very clever person and clinical psychologist, Dr. Holly Schiff, first loves forge new pathways in the brain that become a “permanent fixture in your memory”. Experts agree that even if you set aside the particulars of any first love (including the seemingly important factor of who it was with) they leave literal imprints on our silly little brains. Another smarty-pants (probably lovely) Dr Robin Buckley explains that they also have a similar effect as a “addict’s first high from a gambling win or an addict’s first heroin high”. Just like anything that triggers novel levels of endorphins, dopamine and serotonin, people tend to chase that initial neurochemical high. 

Then to top it all off, most of us experience this life-altering trolleyed state of delusion in our teen years. Which is a double whammy. Apparently, lord help us, this is when our memory and processing powers are at their peak. Dr. Joseph Bordelon kindly reminds us that “memories during your adolescent years leave hormonal imprints at the same time as your neurological developments are forming your identity.” Of course they do. Of course those enormous texts become you. Of course those endless midnight phone calls are your personality now doll. Off you go to prosper, you dramatic sack of adjectives. 

Despite the implied injustice, that hormonal pimply children control our love lives forever, there is hope ladies and gentlemen. According to a real love doctor of the Dolly variety, legendary Dolly Alderton is adamant that none of us are the result of a singular experience. Dolly says “you are the sum total of everything that has ever happened to you”. Everything. Not just the first or the last, but everything in between. She has written much on the subject, and I believe her. She concludes that while, indeed, the shape of love was being written within me in a ute on a coastal highway twenty years ago, so too was it penned at sleepovers in Toowong, around roaring bar tables at the City-Valley crossroads, thumbing through photographs of Korolevu in the 80s, nursing heartaches on the Nadi backroad, watching couples hold hands in supermarkets, standing by as my girl-loves untwined marriages, sitting on wooden chairs as they entered new ones, and the over one thousand times I have rested on my husband’s beautiful shoulder. It has been sketched in the finding, keeping, witnessing, damaging, letting go, and letting in, of love from all over the place. I am the sum of many small things. And a few big ones too.

In full transparency, I am only writing about my first love because I challenged myself to. Not because it continues to interest me particularly. Last year, on my thirty-fifth birthday, I went to my fortnightly screenwriting class at the local community centre. It was the first Full Moon of Spring. When I got in my car to go home, my sneaky Bluetooth system blasted one of my favourite songs, and that smug big ol’ disco ball dangled over the Pacific Ocean. They were like three consorting best friends who refuse to let you lose your magic. It was a celestial intervention. And I sat in the front seat and cried like a baby. 

I had just walked out of a room made of made-up stories. Characters mid-adventure. Imaginations untamed. Real writers had dunked biscuits into tea and discussed dialogue. I had been surrounded by the sort of writing that used to light up my spine. The sort of writing I have been denying myself for longer than I care to admit. The sort of writing that I had become strangely scared of. The sort of writing I secretly assumed I had forgotten how to do forever. The sentimental kind. (I know, gross, disgusting). 

When I started writing, it was never because I had something important to say, all I had was sentiment. Like author Jia Tolentino admits, “I am always confused”, and “writing is my only strategy for making this conflict go away”. That’s all it was. It was between me and me. Writing was the only tool I had to sort through the messes in my head. Then as I became confronted and contorted by the immense messiness of the world, it felt safer to seem smart than soft. I still wrote, but I stayed on the road. I discovered the already discovered. I quoted known terrain. I sourced, underlined, repurposed. I didn’t create anything new. If we’re brutally honest, I didn’t create anything at all. 

That night, sobbing in the front seat, feeling old in body and empty of spirit, I pinkie-promised myself. I would show up again, and not just on LinkedIn. I’d talk to my insides. I would pick off the barnacles of shame I had placed around my own (trivial) human experiences. I’d write them back to life. They may not have the gravitas of a thesis, but they are valuable (and a heck of a lot more adorable). I reminded myself of what Alain de Botton told Pandora Sykes on her podcast Doing It Right. That to write, is simply to try and create or recreate the world in a way that offers people the capacity to better understand theirs. The purpose of sharing stories is never to claim space, but rather to excavate the space between us. To let the distance fall away. It’s okay to do. It is not beastly. It is the opposite.  

So I thought, “okay Matisse, what is the scariest topic you could write about? What is the furthest from United Nations predictions and social impact strategy models you could go?”. And it was obvious. Love. Sappy, soppy, saccharine love. I had to write about stupid love. The pragmatist in me figured it made sense to start at the beginning. 

I thought it was a stroke of good luck how quickly my first love story came back to me. It was a story I knew well. I didn’t have to do much digging (except for some cringe-worthy journal entries that should burn in an endless fire pit). I figured this easy conjure was because the story was whole. It had a beginning, middle and end. But then again, all the love stories of my life (bar my favourite, my current, my sacred, and hopefully my last) are the same. Complete. Yet for some reason they maintain a nebulosity. A sonnet, a sentence, a song maybe. I couldn’t cast the characters, dress the set, and roll tape. 

It intrigued me that the ghost of my first love story had clearer edges. That it has been calcified against the sands of time. While this made for good material as I dipped my toes back into the icky waters of mushy writing, I did stress. “Oh my days. What if I am some nostalgic freak with no hope of ever returning to the thrones of adulthood and maturity? What if one day I am the Prime Minister and I’m caught harping on about drama in the early-noughties? Surely someone so utterly pathetic will be overthrown from within their own ranks!”  It was an awkward start in the challenge of re-self exposure. 

Well as it turns out, I am not pathetic, and neither are you. We are just humans with ridiculous mechanical wiring. So truth be told, my first love does still follow me around. Guilty as charged your honour, please let me get back to my grown-up desk. However the character that has most stayed with me, clear as day, is the young girl in the story. It’s true, she did play play-doh with my mind. She did sculpt this heart of mine. In some troubling ways, and in some brilliant ones. 

She taught me that I have the ability to wholeheartedly, no holds barred, full speed, no brakes, love a person in many forms, as a lover, a friend, a human, and a soul. That teenage girl, in all her spectacle, impatience, and unbridled adoration for questionable music, left me with the gift of seeing the goodness in people. Both up close, and from afar. She was a ninja at getting over things. All because that young girl loved that boy so friggin’ much, she took grudges from me, she put them in the bin, and lit it on fire (alas it would have been preferable for her to throw her diaries in there also). Together, we went on to be a really good friend to some really really good people. All in all, my first love was lathered in kindness. And I am forever ever after thankful for that. 

Xx Matisse 

Ps. Fine. She also left with a slight flair for the dramatic, sue me.