first love

by nancy beckler

You never forget your first love. The feeling you get when you think of them, or whenever you hear their name. The way you will do anything to bring them up in conversation. Below the surface, there is a connection between you and your first love you feel that no one will understand. Every relationship is di erent, so no one experiences their first love the same way you or would experience yours. Alongside my writing, I have asked two intelligent and beautiful women to talk about their first loves: one whose first love did not work out, and someone whose first love did work out, to show you that everyone experiences love di erently.

Experience 1

We met on August 16th, 2018 at marching band camp. She was a sophomore and I was a freshman in high school. That first day, I knew there was something special about her. I needed to get to know her. From that day forward, she was my best friend, my partner in everything. Throughout the marching season, we became closer and closer. We were falling in love. We had German together. It was purely a coincidence that she was in that class on the first day of school and the only open seat was right across from her. We fell deeper in love in that class because of the amount of time we spent together. . Over time, our friends and family were asking us if we were dating. I wasn’t out yet, so we always said no. Deep down, I wanted to be known as her girlfriend so badly. Though, she never really

made me feel like I could possibly be her girlfriend.

In June 2019, I moved to Arizona while she stayed in Illinois. Once I moved our love plateaued, but it was still there, burning brightly under our friendship. On February 16th, 2020, I told her that I loved her. I came out in early January of that year, and I was then able to see my love for her. After months of back and forth of “I love you” and “no, we’re just friends,” I finally committed to our toxic relationship. I do believe that we truly loved each other, but her mental health issues were more intense than I was used to, and I couldn’t be there the way she needed me to be. She couldn’t be there the way I needed her to be. With it being long distance, it was even harder than when we were actually together. I could feel our love growing stronger when I was standing next to her. When I was on a video call with her, something was always missing. Being halfway across the country and in high school, we could never physically be with each other. It really stood out in the long run.

Her mental health causes were what really stood in the way. Long distance we could handle, but when you can not be there for the person you love, it is a very di cult thing to go through. She drained my mental health every day, and I believed the only thing that could make me feel better was her, when really, she depleted me.

We broke up in August of that year. After trying to contact me twice, I finally agreed to just be friends. Deep down, my love never left. After I had a traumatic dream of her death, I thought she was gone. The thought of losing her was absolutely mortifying, even when she drained the life out of me. It solidified my love for her, along with an excessive amount of flirting. We found our love for each other on June 16th, 2021, when I saw her in person for the first time in two years.

She went o to college and started a new life while I finished high school and lived life as usual. We didn’t fit into each other’s new lives, so we broke up in mid-November. I lost my first love, and it broke my heart. I lost the one person I wanted all of my firsts to be with, who I believed could make my dark days bright again. The person who I truly cared for over anyone else in my life. I have finally healed, but this past year has been one of the hardest years of my life, knowing that I could not love her while going through everything.

It wasn’t the right time for us to love each other. We needed our space to grow into who we are supposed to become, and I still believe we do. Loving her made me the person I am today. It influenced my projects and who I am as a person. I know how I can love someone, and how I need to be loved. If we’re supposed to be together one day, then we’ll be together, but I do not see that happening. I’m happy she was my first love, and she will forever hold a special place in my heart.

Experience 2

I began dating my long-term girlfriend during our freshman year of high school. We were together throughout our formative years, for better or worse. To say it was all bad would be boldly untrue – we dated for nearly four years and did genuinely enjoy each other’s company all the while. We shared and supported each other through grief, bereavement, and burnout, and celebrated some of our greatest accomplishments together.

However, because we were each others’ firsts for nearly everything, we lacked standards for what was normal and healthy. Overconfidence in the stability of our relationship led us to become complacent. Month over month, insecurity turned to resentment, and arguments over inconsequential things interrupted our every week. It wasn’t immediately apparent to either of us how unhappy we really were. We broke up in February of this year, though the relationship had ended long before that.

I wholeheartedly thought that dating another woman meant I was invulnerable; we could level with one another in ways other couples our age could not, and we were immune to power di erentials. We moved quickly and entrusted a lot with one another, and I held the impression that sapphic love meant my partner could never hurt me. At fifteen in a largely rural town, nobody had the conversation about boundaries, consent, or sexual abuse, much less in the context of same-sex relationships. I thought that there was no way she could hurt me the way I imagined a man might. She could, and did. I carried with me a grotesque, shameful relationship with sex and my own body image for years.

I’d like to not blame her, as we were both far too young. It’s undeniable that we loved hard and took good care of one another for a very long time. Still, a combination of shame, fear, and guilt meant the cycle of abuse was allowed to continue for months. Even after it all, I thought losing her would kill me – it very nearly did – but I’m happier now than I thought I’d ever have a shot at being again. I’d like to think the experience didn’t make me a cynic, and I strongly hold that love is real. However, if any of my perspectives on love are cynical, it’s this parting thought: I think everyone needs a first love, and everyone should lose them. It’s taught me more than I knew I needed to learn.

Experience 3

I met her during my freshman year of high school. Our relationship was preceded by nearly two years of mutual pining which both of us were too blind to notice. Every late-night car ride, FaceTime call, and every other adventure was accompanied by an undeniable love for each other. At the time, we both assumed it was a feeling that could remain platonic. I was out, she was not. And I didn’t know that she ever planned to be. Neither of us knew it, but I think we spent those two years waiting for the other to be ready.

Finally, just before my 16th birthday, she told me she’d been in love with me for months, and I told her the same. It seemed as if all the puzzle pieces had fallen into place for the time being. As much as we loved each other, those around us were convinced that we wouldn’t last. Our friendship had been built around an unhealthy dependency on each other, and she was set to move out of state for college in just a few months. Still, we pushed forward.

The pandemic happened and postponed her move. We were crushed by the tragedies occurring before our eyes, but grateful for the extra time we had together. However, the move could not be postponed forever. At the end of July that year, she left for the first time. I was beyond crushed, unsure of how to navigate this new reality.

Long distance was, and still is, a unique challenge. Our time together is framed by an inevitable end, where one of us will get on a plane, and our dates will become FaceTime calls once again. However, I wouldn’t trade this for the world. There is no reality where she is fulfilling her potential in Arizona, and there is no reality where I am happily pursuing my dreams in a state I’ve never called home. Along the way, we’ve unlearnt the codependency we once had. She’s made me into a more patient, honest person. She is my first true love, and I truly believe she will be my last. Through years of long distance and issues I couldn’t have dreamt up, we have stuck by each other. We aren’t married, and we don’t plan to be for a while. However, I truly believe in “for better and for worse.” We have been through better, and we have been through worse. To this day, we continue to prove initial assumptions about our relationship wrong. She makes me a better person, and I do the same for her. For better, or for worse, she is not just my first love. She may be my only love. is a in

Experiencing first loves in our youth shapes who we are today. One of us learned how to love the way to be loved; one learned that in order to know love, you need to lose love; and, one of us learned how to love. Some first loves work out, and others do not. It does not mean that you should not want to the experience. It means that everyone experiences it di erently. First love is a beautiful thing, and it shapes you into who you will become, no matter the outcome. Learn from our examples, but do not run with them. Take everything into your own hands, and run as fast and far as you can.

She’s had her work published in other school newspapers, and knows this is just the beginning of her journey.

My name is Mia Yañez, am a sophomore Barrett student and the author of an 80,000 word fantasy book called Tetrachrome. Writing is my greatest passion, and love learning new things about the craftsmanship of prose every day !

If you said it back, I could die peacefully

Lourdes Loera

e way your skin brushed mine today, reminded me,

If I could,

I would carry your shoulders tall above my head, So they graze the cool clouds

You always say are too far from your reach I would run beside your enduring legs into that dead street, Illuminated by all the light you shyly turn your head from & When your hands, shakily, grip your pen, nearly out of ink,

Trying to extract those last godly ounces of wisdom your tilted head holds, I would brush your hair away from your furrowed brow & Peck every delicate strand you say is too greasy, always needing washing I would wipe the grime and dust from outside the doors

Of the life you forced me to build

I would pit patter every inch of you made rough during the lean months

With the softest vanilla & warm you by the hearth

So your skin would know every rich scent was made for you alone I would feed you, handful by handful

On the grain my kin saved for me to give to whomsoever shared my table I would fatten you in winter

Take you to the sea in summer

Just so you can see how birds ock & dip as one beneath a setting sun

How the ocean, too, stretches toward your calloused feet

Trying to relieve the harsh oors you’ve danced upon

Lourdes is a fourth-year undergraduate pursuing dual degrees in chemistry and anthropology. Their passions include belly dance, the outdoors, and toasted bagels.

If I could, If you’d let me,

I would be your ocean, your grain, your pen

Authors Note

This paper, although factual, is not invulnerable from use of potentially biased language correlating from the American perspective this paper comes from.

There is a tendency for those in the U.S. to look at demographics and generations from purely their personal point of view. The average millennial, zoomer, boomer, etc. simultaneously believes that they are both smarter than the older generations but wiser than the younger generations. What this view tends to forget is that all generations make up society, with many playing drastically diferent parts that make a country function. China has a particular issue in its country regarding its younger generations. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wishes to make China a self-reliant consumption based superpower, not a manufacturing cog in the globalist machine. This end goal of China seems to the West as a threat and inevitable future, a future where authoritarianism wins out over democracy due to its efciency and competence. But what this assumption fails to recognize is China’s domestic issues that prevent it from reshaping its economy and society. Where this is most prevalently seen is in China’s younger population which stands in the way of the CCP’s goals in more ways than one.

everywhere, it’s also why China won’t become a superpower.

Demographics

Arizona is a state whose demographic situation has been steadily but moderately getting worse ever since stricter immigration laws were placed on it in 2007. Arizona went from consistently adding 700,000+ to every new generation before 2007 to adding 300,000+ afterwards; this is not defnitely not ideal, but compared to China it looks like nothing. China’s population is 1.41 billion and will peak in two years, according to the UN, and then start dropping rapidly afterwards until 2050. That same projection concludes the Chinese population will shrink to 747 million by 2100, and that’s the best case scenario, while the worst case predicts China to drop to 494 million by 2100. This is critical because young people are essential to an economy, as they are the main drivers of economic consumption, labor, education, innovation, and will replace the older generation’s roles in government and business when they retire. This means young people are valued by governments in 1980, China enacted a policy of limiting Chinese birth rates due to the overwhelming number of Chinese people causing the economy to struggle to provide for the populace. This policy was brutal in its own right forcing Chinese women who already have a child to get state mandated abortions and repression for non frst born children. But the ramifcations for China’s society were even worse, China has 36 years of only one child being born which artifcially lowered the amount of young people while the population present before the one child policy began to age and began needing assistance from the younger generations. The one child policy was scrapped in 2016 but by that time China’s population graph was horrible with less and less people being born in every new generation.

China has very few young people relative to its older generations. China’s main drivers of economic growth being 15-24 year olds make up only 12.47% of the population with 175 million people. Retirees in China (60 and older) are numbered at 260 million which is ~14% of the population. This is already an issue, there are fewer young people who need to pay taxes, work, and innovate to take care of and support old people than the amount of old people needing care. But this is extremely troubling considering China’s population aged 45-59 is ~21% of the population, these people are transitioning into retirement either very soon or have already started. China is now developed enough to lower birth rates, allow people to retire at an earlier age, and raise the country’s life expectancy. This means that there are very few young Chinese people to take care and prop up a non-functioning generation of the country in the next few years which will put immense pressure on the Chinese economy and social situation.

Sex Ratio

women than men in Arizona). In Chinese society men are valued more than women, so many parents decided during the one child policy to abort girl babies and have male ones instead, this would in turn increase their social status in Chinese society, well now there are tens of millions of Chinese men who will never reproduce despite China’s eforts to encourage them to do so.

How did it get this way? The answer to this is simple: because of the one child policy. Starting

The sex ratio is the diference in population between men and women. In China it has risen from 104 men for every 100 women to 112 men for every 100 women in the past 5 years. The population will decline even more as there are way too many men who can’t marry Chinese women. For comparison, the sex ratio in Arizona is roughly 100 women for every 100 men (only 9,000 more

China has since 2016 implemented a three child policy in an attempt to reinvigorate birth rates, it gives fnancial incentives for having more than one child. This policy has failed with China’s fertility rate getting lower and lower by the year, but why? This question too is very easy to answer, Chinese people simply don’t want kids. According to a 2021 youth survey (ages 18-26) done by the Communist Youth League found 44% of young women don’t want children, nor plan to marry while 25% of young men also stated they do not wish to marry or have children. The most commonly stated reasons for not marrying was fnancial pressure and not having energy for marriage. This means even fewer children will be born into the Alpha generation, further plunging China’s economy into a crisis for the young generations needing to support the highly dependent older generations.

Population Recording

What could possibly make this situation worse for China? Well, what if the government has been lying about their population numbers? This is proposed to be the case by famous demographer Fuxian Yi, who claims, using 1990 Chinese unclassifed demographics data, that the Chinese population isn’t actually 1.4 billion but rather 1.28 billion. According to Yi, the UN estimate that China’s population will peak in two years is false, he believes it already has. China’s population reporting is all over the place with diferent sources and government institutions stating diferent fgures, a good example of this was the six census vs economic census data in 2009. The fgures for the two censuses that reviewed the same sources with the same information came out with a 36 million person diference between the two censuses for ages 0-18. But why is this the case, why is their data unreliable? The answer is simple yet again, its subsidies. China is a top down command economy, so funding towards any initiative has to come from the upper echelon of government down to lower governments, down to local governments, down to even more localized specialized governments. Federal census bureaus in China essentially get their population numbers from local governments or provincial governors, who receive budgets according to their needs not wants. Well this sounds like a perfect system with nothing wrong with it, until a governor wants more than what he needs either for personal gain or political reasons. Yi claims the majority reason for poor census data is due to local governments infating their population numbers for higher budgets or subsidies, seeing as on some local levels the population fuctuates considerably when viewing its data pattern this makes a lot of sense.

Governments need accurate information to properly implement policy, if the information given is not accurate and a policy is made around that, it will either not work or make the situation worse. Yi claims the Chinese population peaked around 2009, considering that the one child policy ended in 2016, if the Chinese government had more accurate numbers it could have dealt with the issue sooner but it didn’t because of unreliable data. In Arizona, and America as a whole, this isn’t much of an issue, government population records tend to be very accurate with any misinformation being cleared up by private organizations. The reason why American data is more reliable is because in democracies, the parties in preparation for elections need accurate data in order to advertise their policies to essential voters, which incentivises accurate population recording.

Youth Giving Up

China’s youth issue isn’t just that they don’t have many young, the young they do have do not view society highly and aren’t meeting “CCP standards”. Take the “lying fat” movement. It began spreading like wildfre around Chinese social media in 2021. It encouraged Chinese people to stop struggling with the stress and expectations of Chinese society and to just lay fat. It’s a form of online activism that discourages Chinese people from stressing over work, status, and consumerism and instead to enjoy life. In China, activism and anti-government gatherings are banned meaning that forms of activism like this are becoming more commonplace on Chinese social media (which young people are most present on).

social boards having hundreds of thousands of members (before the government deleted them). This movement was like “lying fat” but with more cynicism as it discouraged people from even caring about society. What these movements show are two main things: young Chinese people are becoming further detached from society and Chinese youth are further using social media as a platform for activism and resistance against the Chinese government. This is really bad for the CCP whose main goal is to transition from a manufacturing economy to a self-reliant, consumption based, superpower.

How can China change its society, economy, and status on the world stage if its young people just want to lay fat and let it rot?

Chinese youth. Another good example is the 2021 crackdown on the gaming industry which saw 14,000 gaming related frms shut down, decreasing available games for young people and tech jobs. Chinese youth unemployment is some of the worst in the developed world with its youth unemployment rate being 19.3% in 2022. In comparison, the U.S. youth unemployment rate in 2022 is 8.1% and even that statistic has been a nightmare for young adult Americans.

Conclusion

necessary, are unlikely to come true as the Chinese government has shown time and time again.

In 2022, the “let it rot” movement became more pronounced with

But why are China’s youth losing faith in society? This doesn’t have a simple answer, as it has to do with social and economic pressure in an era of connectedness that brings its own set of pressures (cyberbullying is a good example), but the CCP hasn’t made the situation any better. Take the social harmony policy China initiated two years ago meant to increase support for the CCP by putting new rules on the tech and education sectors, it resulted in businesses losing money, jobs being lost, and more depressed

China’s youth problem is not just one of economics and demographics, but encompasses the youth’s attitude to society as a wider whole. Chinese young people are becoming more depressed and nihilistic as time goes on both because of social pressure and government policy. Government policy seems to be the driving factor towards all of these issues dating back to the 1980 one child policy to the 1991 nationwide one child policy to the 2021 no covid policy, so on and so forth. The CCP needs to address this issue thoroughly and immediately but before it can it needs accurate information and less oppressive policies towards its economy and younger populace. These two things, while

China is an example for other nations to look at and learn from. Arizona is an area with a steadily rising population subsidized via immigration which allows it to stay relatively stable economically with a strong base of young workers which Arizona needs in order to turn into the “new Silicon Valley”. Arizona’s demographics aren’t great but certainly aren’t terrible. The lessons to be learned from China are to avoid economic policy that seeks to promote societal values, avoid discouraging births, and ensure a larger younger population compared to the older dependent population. For Arizona to ensure this is simple, they should allow for a steady fow of immigrants (most immigrants are young and hard workers), and not enact sweeping alienating social policy. This is something that voters in the 2022 midterms to not throw of Arizona’s demographics which barely has more gen Z’s than millennials who are barely bigger in size to gen X.

My name is Drake, I’m from Atlanta, Georgia but grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and my major is political science. An interest for my whole life has been international politics and I express this through my hobby of writing news articles about world events.