When I was still in high school, I learned what first love was. This girl was a grade below me. Her name was Rita.
It seemed to me at the time that she looked a lot like Queen of Navarre, which I had just read not long ago. I addressed her as Margot, not Rita.
She only laughed in response. Rita thought I was too abstruse. Maybe I was, but not that smart. I just loved to read books. She thought I was a loser.
Tried to hang out more with guys who had better parents than me. I was brought up by my mother. But she gave us everything she could.
She worked two jobs to feed my sister and me. She was a pediatrician, and in the evenings and on weekends, she worked part-time in a pharmacy, as a pharmacist. My sister and I always wanted to be good doctors.
But Rita didn’t pay much attention to me, she kind of let herself be loved and nothing more. But with other guys, she went to clubs and parties.
After school, I really wanted, no matter what, to continue a relationship with her, but she laughed back at me:
“I’m sorry, but you’re not the hero, my romance. I like completely different guys, more confident and fun. And you like to talk in abstruse words, which you read in your books. I’m bored with you.”
Her words really hurt me. Is it really bad, nowadays, when a person likes to read?
I decided for myself that I was done begging Rita for love. I calmly went to medical school. I’m probably lying if I say that I forgot for her, no, I have long suffered from unrequited love, and that I do not understand.
But studying, helped me, to overcome these feelings in me. By the end of my studies, I had already forgotten about my first love. I met a charming girl Dasha in internship.
To her, I did not seem something dull and boring. Perhaps because we were, as they say now: “on the same wave”. She also became a doctor. We got married very soon and we had a daughter. I was just happy.
As the years passed, my wife and I were considered to be very good specialists. We decided to open our own clinic. By this time my sister had also become a doctor.
We gathered a team of good doctors and got down to business. One day, a young woman came to see me. Something in her look looked familiar to me. She called my name, and I remembered her. It turned out to be Rita.
We got to talking, and she confessed to me what a fool she was, leaving me for strange suitors. She complained that her personal life had never been established. I did not care what she said. I communicated, purely out of politeness. And then she asked me to go out with her. I said no, and I did so with great pleasure:
“No, I can’t. I have a wife with whom we read in the evenings and discuss everything we read. And we, it’s very interesting.”
She understood my sarcasm, got up and left without even saying goodbye. And I suddenly felt so good at heart and at peace.
It’s a good thing things didn’t work out between me and her. What would I have done with her? Probably I would have been bored with her and had nothing to talk about.
