My First Romance

I was thinking about how interesting our high school reunion is going to be when I was suddenly thrown back into a forgotten memory with such force that I almost relived it. You know when you remember something that you haven’t for a long time and you feel as though you’re reading an old book, because it’s so foreign yet so familiar? Well that’s what happened to me.

When I was seven or so, we went to my mum’s twenty-year high school reunion at the Hydro Hotel in Leeton, a small country town close to Wagga in NSW. And in this hotel I met my first love.

His name was Jack and that’s pretty much all I remember about him, unfortunately. But during the weekend we stayed in the Hydro, we played together all the time. I remember being in the beer garden of the hotel and feeling like Mary in The Secret Garden, which was my favourite book and movie when I was little. I was Mary and he was my Dickon, and it was all very romantic.

I had this feeling that the hotel was haunted, although at that age I had a bit of a thing about ghosts, and everywhere I went I thought had some sort of spirit lingering there and talking to me; the Hydro, and holiday house we rented once in Berry, even the house next door to my primary school. I was a veritable ghost whisperer, like that television show with that woman who looks as though she is in a permanent state of distress in it ... um, moving on. So Jack and I did some investigating in the grandfather clock in one of the rooms, and we even went into his bedroom (the floorboards were dark wooden and there were trains everywhere, from memory), which, being Not a Teenager, was not weird at all.

Just before my family left to go back to Sydney I remember playing along the side of the hotel with milk cartons, all the grass was burnt yellow, there were weeds everywhere and broken bricks.

Anyway, that’s all I can really remember of my first beautiful romance, tucked away in country New South Wales. And don’t worry! Being seven (7), nothing untoward happened. It was just nice, as far as I can remember.

Love you like little kids in “love”.

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