They say you never forget the first time you fell in love. I know I haven’t. I’ll never forget the day we met, our first kiss, our first fight, or the first time I told him that I loved him. He made falling in love for the first time an unforgettable adventure.

I met him on the beach when I was just six years old, his grandparents owned a house on the lake two doors down from mine, the red one and he was the only other kid in the neighborhood. I was shy at first meeting him, as I always was with meeting new people, but I quickly opened up. He showed me a fort he made, a small elevated cubby area underneath the red staircase that lead down to the beach from the camp house. We spent everyday in that fort for the next few years, talking, sharing jokes, playing pranks on people and hiding from our parents. Finally, we grew too big to fit under the stairs and had to relocate to the bank one beach over and that became our best fort yet. We called it our headquarters and put in a plastic entrance mat, made a bench out of small tree that had fallen over and tied a rope to another tree that led down the bank to make it easier to climb up. In the fort we were separate from the real world, it was there that we developed our spirit of adventure. Once we entered that fort we ceased to be the little kids that the world saw and transformed into the worlds best top secret agents. We ran around and explored every nook and cranny of the neighborhood, looking for the best places to hide from our imaginary enemies. The neighbors probably thought that we were obnoxious, running and screaming all the time, but we didn’t care, we had bigger things to worry about, we were secret agents for crying out loud!

There was no denying that we had become best friends. We played all day everyday during the summers. As we grew older the games changed. We retired as spies when a new family with three kids moved into the yellow house next to his camp. We made it clear that we were the leaders in the neighborhood. No one could surpass us: we were invincible. Hide and seek became our new game and after that it was jumping competitions on my trampoline, which became our new headquarters. And somewhere between all these games on hot summer days, we fell in love.

He told me he had a crush on me for the first time on an evening in early September. When I was ten and he was twelve we had been together all day and our parents had given us permission to stay out past curfew so that we could stargaze. We sat on a bench in the backyard of his grandparents camp looking at the stars when he whispered in my ear, “I like you.” he said. My heart jumped and I got butterflies in my stomach, I didn’t know what to say exactly but I knew that I felt the same way. We decided a few weeks later that we would be boyfriend and girlfriend, opening up the door to an all new adventure, the adventure of young love.

This was a different adventure. An adventure of hand holding, watching movies on rainy days, and sneaking over to each others houses when our parents went to work. It was far more exciting than any spy mission we had assigned ourselves. It was also more dangerous. Our parents didn’t like the idea of us dating at such a young age so they didn’t let us spend much time together and when they did it was always supervised in some way. We didn’t let them keep us apart though, we did anything and everything we could just to see each other. But just like in any relationship there came a rough spot. We started arguing over little things, and then those arguments turned into bigger fights, which ultimately led to our first break up. It wasn’t pretty and isn’t something I try to remember. We spent the next five years being that couple who was always “on again off again.” We spent an entire year and a half being “off again” which gave us time to mature.

When we reunited in April of my junior year in high school we realized for the first time that we really did share something special. No matter how many times we broke up we always came back to each other and found that we still had feeling for one another. I learned something from falling in love with him; I learned what it means to be in love. It means that you can’t imagine yourself without that other person; that you’ll always feel a certain way about them no matter what happens in your lives. I learned that first love can turn out to be true love; I learned that love is fun and love is painful, I learned that love is the greatest adventure of all.