When someone asks me, “Who was your first kiss?” my mind goes blank. A high school classmate, maybe? Someone I’ve long since forgotten.

When they ask, “Who was your first boyfriend?” I can barely piece together an answer. There’s a hazy outline—a boy who was supposed to be devastatingly handsome, stolen away by my cousin. But I can’t see his face. Can’t recall his name. Can’t remember anything about us. He must have meant nothing to me, I always reasoned. After all, how could I forget someone who truly mattered?

When they ask, “Who was your first love?” I’ve always answered: Fred. The man I met in Monumento, Caloocan in 1999. That’s where my story began—or so I believed.

But I had no idea how much I’d buried. How many memories lay hidden beneath the surface, locked away for three decades. Waiting.

But he came back. Three decades have passed, and the memories rose like ghosts from shallow graves… fragmented, hazy, but insistent.

A boy. He was 16. I was 14.

It started ordinarily enough. At school, a neighbor… my schoolmate… delivered the news: his cousin had a crush on me, wanted to court me. I shrugged, unable to imagine it mattered.

Then he appeared.

I was walking home from school when I saw him—this dashing boy of 16, dressed like he’d stepped out of a music video in his urban hip-hop outfit. He introduced himself. JB. The new kid in town. The cousin. I’d glimpsed him in our neighborhood days before, thought him impossibly handsome, so far above my league that the possibility of his interest had never even flickered through my mind.

He wasn’t in school—already working at 16. But every day, he’d borrow his cousin’s uniform just to slip onto our campus and share lunch with me. Every afternoon, he’d be waiting to walk me home. One day at our favorite meeting spot, he asked if I would be his girlfriend. I couldn’t answer. Instead, like the child I still was—an ’80s/’90s kid in hand-me-down clothes from typhoon donations and those classic “puruntong” shorts—I climbed trees and jumped around, playing. He asked again. “Silence means yes,” I finally said, then went back to being a little kid, carrying my massive insecurities like stones in my pockets. How could someone who looked like a matinee idol want someone like me?

But somehow, he did.

We were effortless together. Our personalities fit like puzzle pieces, and the memories we made were golden and uncomplicated. He was my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my forgotten first love. I was his first girlfriend, first love and first kiss as well. It was the best and purest time of my life—when love asked nothing of me except that I exist.

Then came my uncle’s wake.

All the kids and teenagers had gathered that night when my cousin arrived—older than us, beautiful, with a reputation for claiming any boy she wanted. She sat down beside JB and began to flirt. He just sat there. And I watched. She was everything I wasn’t: fully formed where I was barely becoming, stylish where I was threadbare. Next to her, JB looked like he’d found his match.

My 14-year-old heart shattered in that moment.

I decided for both of us. Certain I would lose him to her, I ran. I stopped speaking to him entirely, severed everything we’d been. For nine years, he tried to reach me, tried to talk. When I came home to the province at 19, his cousin found me with a message: JB wanted to see me. By then, I’d become what I’d dreamed of—a fully formed young woman, dressed well, pretty. But standing there, I thought: “What’s the point? I waited to become this person for him, but I’m with someone else now.”

So I didn’t see him. I let the door close on whatever we might have said to each other.

But the wound never healed. I just learned to bury it deeper.

I consciously did everything I could to forget him. Every time his memory surfaced and the heartbreak came rushing back, I distracted myself until the pain dulled, then disappeared. Eventually, his face faded into nothing. All I remembered was that I’d had a first boyfriend whose features I couldn’t recall, and that my cousin had stolen him. I didn’t even remember he was my first love—I convinced myself it was someone else.

At 17, I found myself homeless on the streets of Manila, taking shelter under bridges and train stations. I became a stripper. I navigated an underground world that most people only encounter in movies or novels—drug lords, gambling lords, illegal cartels. I went to jail for working underage. I was kidnapped. At some point auctioned like a commodity. I became a drug addict. And through it all, I fell into the same pattern in countless toxic relationships: I only ever dated deadbeats, losers, extractive men below my league who used me. They felt less dangerous than JB had been. I didn’t know this consciously, but some part of me understood—if I only chose men who had nothing to offer, they’d stay, they’d choose me, I’d never have to feel that kind of heartbreak again.

With only a high school diploma, I clawed my way back. I taught myself computer engineering. I got hired as a senior developer for a Fortune 100 company—one of the biggest airlines in the world, based in Chicago. My career thrived. I was promoted to systems architect, won awards for my work, became an Engineering Manager leading a cross-functional team of highly educated engineers and architects, with degrees I never had.

But my love life remained a disaster—still dating deadbeats, still repeating the pattern.

Finally, I stopped. I decided to be alone for the rest of my life. I read everything, watched countless videos about love and relationships. All the advice was the same: mind games. “Don’t be too available.” Act this way, not that way. If I couldn’t be my authentic self, I’d rather be with no one.

Then I met T.

He was the complete opposite of anyone I’d dated since JB. Six-foot-seven, very fit, looked like a Calvin Klein supermodel. A Linux engineer and AWS architect. A surfer, a kickboxer. He played guitar and sang beautifully. He was genuinely kind, truly benevolent. He owned a house, an SUV, a Harley motorcycle—all paid off. Big savings account, money in the stock market, a storage business. He had every quality any woman could want. And he wanted me. He wanted to live together, to settle down.

My siblings begged me to settle down with him. I explained that I was happy living alone and didn’t want to trade my peace for anything. Despite all of T’s qualities, I didn’t feel the connection. I didn’t feel understood.

I told them I didn’t think anyone would ever understand me—my life arc was too unique. The odds of finding someone who truly understood were like winning the Powerball.

The only way I’d ever get married was if a man surpassed T, was benevolent, loved my family, and understood who I was and what I’d been through. Someone who knew what it was like to have nothing, to be a vagabond, and rise up. Someone who knew patience, endurance, perseverance. Someone who knew what it meant to sacrifice for the people they loved, to be so incredibly lonely it felt suffocating. Someone who knew what it was like to live exiled from home, to get beaten up by life so thoroughly and still come out whole—kinder, more compassionate. Someone whose life arc mirrored mine.

It was an impossible standard.

“I will never be in a relationship again,” I said. “I will never get married, because it’s impossible to find the man I’m looking for.”

Then something strange began.

A single line from a song wormed its way into my consciousness: “If I found the place, would I recognize the face?” Over and over. Day after day. For months, it played on an endless loop in my mind, insistent and unexplained.

One afternoon, while helping a friend organize her home, I caught myself singing it aloud throughout the day. Finally, I apologized. “Sorry—I don’t know why, but that line has been stuck in my head for months.”

I had no idea it was trying to tell me something.

Then one day, without warning, a memory surfaced—something crucial, something vital—only to slip away before I could grasp it. And my mouth spoke on its own.

“Sabira!! Sabira!! Sabira!!”

The words tore out of me like a desperate cry for help. I didn’t know what they meant. I didn’t know why I was saying them. But my brain was in full panic, seized by an urgency I couldn’t understand. Something deep inside me was screaming: “You have to remember! You must not forget! If nothing else—just remember Sabira!”

I called my siblings immediately. I had to tell someone.

“Something strange just happened,” I said. “It was like something possessed me for a moment.”

I didn’t know then that it wasn’t possession.

It was my past, fighting to be remembered.

Two weeks later, JB found me on Facebook. After searching for me for three decades. I found out on the day, he restarted his search for me — was the same day my mouth spoke “Sabira!! Sabira!! Sabira!!”

He messaged me, asked if I remembered him. But I didn’t. I clicked on his profile, scrolled through his photos, and my heart skipped a beat. “Who is this? Handsome—devastatingly so. Be careful. Don’t get carried away. Ask who he is first. He might be a relative.” I didn’t even know it was him, and I was already falling again. I sent his pictures to my siblings: “His name is JB. I don’t remember him. Do any of you know him?”

Then a fragment of memory returned, a flashback: him kissing me in an alley on the way home from school.

Now I’m 44. He’s 46. Still professing his undying love for me, telling me I’m his first love, that he never forgot me. He wants to see me. And when he told me about the life he’d lived these past three decades, it was like looking in a mirror. He’d also become a vagabond, endured hardships, lived exiled from home. His life arc was nearly identical to mine.

He was the impossible standard. And the universe delivered.

And just like the line in the song that was stuck in my head, I did not recognized him at first.

And for 13 years, he’d been living in Saudi Arabia—exiled, just as I had been living in the US for the last 15 years.

I opened Google, and typed: Sabira

The definition appeared on my screen:

The name Sabira is primarily of Arabic origin, meaning “patient,” “enduring,” or “persevering,” derived from the root word sabr (patience). It signifies resilience and strength in facing adversity, often found in Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures, and can also have Sanskrit connections meaning “beautiful”.

My breath caught.

Patient. Enduring. Persevering. Resilient in the face of adversity.

Every word was JB. The essence of who he was, distilled into a single name I’d buried for thirty years.

And he lived in Saudi Arabia.

The coincidence was impossible. The connection, undeniable.

My subconscious had been trying to tell me all along.

It was as though no time had passed at all. We snapped right back to the way we were. There was no ambiguity, no games. He came full force: “I love you. I always have, always will. I want to marry you. I want us to grow old together. I want to take care of you. I love you across all time—not just one specific version of you when we were teenagers. I love YOU, the fundamental YOU, the irreducible YOU. Whatever the past 30 years has done to you—those aren’t you, those are add-ons. YOU are who I love.”

No games. No push and pull. He works 12.5 hours per day, and in every pocket of free time, he makes time for me. He’s never too busy to check on me. With him, I don’t need to be anything else. He chose me long before I became what everyone sees me as now—puruntong shorts and all.

I still don’t remember everything. But every time he tells me a memory, my own version surfaces—piece by piece, our shared history coming back to life.

We’ve been talking. We’re starting over again—or rather, continuing what we started three decades ago.

So now, when someone asks me, “Who was your first kiss? Who was your first boyfriend? Who was your first love?”—I finally know the answer.

It was always JB.

Our story isn’t over. It’s just beginning again.