(Nov. 19, 2010) Jane’s best friend got her 13th tattoo this weekend, and according to her, she’s stopping there. “This is either good luck, or it’s bad luck, so I’m just gonna stop here.”
As the 13th tattoo is the cartoon-like illustration of half a heart outlined in black, it seems to embody a paradox of good luck and bad luck, depending on how one looks at it.
More specifically, the tattoo is of a broken heart, and her ex-boyfriend from her adolescence houses the other half. And Jane has an inkling that the end of her friend’s tattoo era originates from her beginning of love.
Hearing the tale of their short-lived reunion, after years of having no contact at all, invites Jane to reminisce about past loves of her own. Specifically, the oldest love she can have: her first love.
As Jane recognizes that elements of the first love will always reign, she also considers how a first love will never be found again. As such, she then wonders, can one love first, twice? The first love will never be stolen, nor shared. Those who meet after their own initial first loves will never be the same as they were the first time they fell, nor will they be eager to let that experience go.
For Jane, a first love marks the first time she has ever felt unabashedly excited about a person, it is the first time she felt completely connected in an elevated sort of friendship. It is the first time she experienced betrayal, the first time she understood how gut-wrenching heartache could actually be.
A first love is the relationship that sets the benchmark for how Jane will handle future relationships. It is the last time she will be extremely vulnerable, the last time she will be naïve and the last time she will ever want to be that way again.
The first love is what all other relationships will be compared to, until finally, one settles on his or her true love. For Jane, it seems all those in between were just the buffer after her first love and before her true love. A first love marks an awakening of one’s ability to open up to someone else; a true love punctuates one’s desire to open up to no one else.
It seems to Jane that once a first love ends, it can always be revisited, but it will be forever lost.
Those who have experienced first loves share the whispered secret that an old first love may in fact be forever emblazoned within us. And with the markings of Jane’s best friend’s 13th tattoo, raises the question: exactly how permanent are the markings of an old love? And exactly who can actually see it?
just jane. 
Wow. I love it.