A Letter To My First Crush

Dear You,

I don’t know if you’ll ever read this… or if I’d even want you to. This isn’t meant to be found, really. It’s just something I needed to say—softly, slowly, like a thought that’s been waiting in the quiet for far too long. I’ve carried you with me all these years like a pressed flower between the pages of a life that kept turning… delicate, unchanged, always fading but never forgotten.

You were my first crush.

And I say that with a kind of ache that’s almost warm now… the way an old scar doesn’t hurt anymore but still remembers the wound. You didn’t know, of course. Or maybe you did in that mysterious, far-off way people sometimes do—when they feel eyes lingering just a heartbeat too long, when laughter becomes a little more careful, when silence fills the air between two people like a secret being kept.

You never asked. I never said.

But oh, I noticed everything. I remember the way you smiled, that soft, lopsided grin like you were keeping something funny just for yourself. I remember how you’d tilt your head when you listened, like you wanted to catch every word before it drifted off into nothing. You were always surrounded by noise and light, and yet somehow you never seemed to notice how people gravitated toward you… how I did.

You were sunlight without knowing it. And I… I was a window, watching it all from the inside.

There was this one moment—just a moment—but I carry it like a fragile stone in my pocket. We were standing too close, not close enough, and the world was quiet in that way where everything slows down, and I swear you looked at me like you saw something. Not love, not longing—just a flicker, a knowing. A pause. And maybe I imagined it, maybe I wanted it too badly… but I’ve played it in my mind so many times it’s taken root. It’s part of the architecture of who I am now.

I never told anyone. Not really. It felt too sacred… like speaking it aloud would shatter something fragile inside me. You were my secret… my first soft ache… the gentle pull in my chest that made me write terrible poems and stare out windows and wonder what it meant to miss someone who was never really yours.

I think that’s the part that stings most sweetly. You were never mine. You were never even close. But my God, I loved the feeling of almost… the way it let me dream in small, bright fragments. You never broke my heart—you never held it. But you brushed by it, and it trembled.

There was no grand story. No climactic ending. You drifted out of my life like a warm day turning into dusk… nothing tragic, nothing said. And yet… the absence was sharp. I felt it in the hallways, in the places where you used to stand, in the silence where your voice used to live.

You were my first proof that the heart could swell quietly. That love didn’t need permission or reciprocation to bloom. It just… did. Like wildflowers in places no one planted them.

And now, years later, I think of you sometimes. When a certain kind of laughter catches me off guard. When a sunset hits the pavement just right. When I hear a name that sounds like yours, or a song you might’ve liked. It’s not longing—not anymore. Just… a soft ache. A beautiful ghost.

If I could say one thing to you, if you were here, sitting across from me in the hush of a fading day, I’d tell you thank you. Not for what we had—because we never had anything real—but for what I felt. For the way you opened something in me that I didn’t know existed. For teaching me that it’s okay to feel deeply, even when it doesn’t go anywhere. Especially then.

Some people are meant to be lessons, and some are meant to be memories. You, I think, were both.

I wonder what you’d say if you read this. If you’d smile. If you’d feel a twinge of something you can’t name. Or maybe you wouldn’t remember me at all, and that’s okay too. This letter isn’t about you, not really. It’s about the version of you that lived in my mind, that walked with me through quiet corridors and watched me grow up from the shadows.

I’ve loved other people since. Differently. Sharply. Messily. Truly. But you… you were the first. And there’s something about firsts, isn’t there? They never quite let go.

So here’s to you. To the golden glow of what almost was. To the hush of beginnings and the sweetness of silence. To the way hearts can bend without breaking. To the beauty of never knowing what could’ve been—and loving the mystery of it anyway.

Forever in the softest part of my memory,

Me.