I met my husband during our senior year of high school, back when life still felt simultaneously simple and infinite—when the future stretched out before us like an open road with no visible end, and we genuinely believed that love alone could conquer absolutely anything that came our way.
We were both seventeen that year, living in a mid-sized town in Pennsylvania where everyone knew everyone else’s business. We were young enough to believe with our whole hearts that love was all you needed, yet old enough to make plans that felt permanent and binding. We talked endlessly about which colleges we’d apply to together, about cramped studio apartments with bad plumbing that we’d somehow make romantic, about future careers we pretended to understand even though we had no real concept of what adult life would actually demand from us.
His name was Michael, and he was my absolute first
