I must’ve been nine or ten, still soft around the edges, still trying to figure out where my elbows belonged in the world, school blazer too big, tie always half-wrong, that stupid cowlick refusing to obey any law known to hair or man, and there was this girl—aye, her, the one whose name still tastes like chalkdust and winter wind when I think it—sitting three rows ahead in that coldbright classroom where the radiators rattled like half-asleep dragons and the fluorescent lights flickered their migraine hymn, and she had that quiet kind of glow, not the movie-star shine folk talk about later, but something smaller, honest, like a candle refusing to give up in a room full of drafts, and every time she pushed her hair behind her ear the whole class seemed to go silent, except it didn’t, that was just my pulse thumping louder than sense.

     I adored her in the dumb wordless way boys do before language catches up, a kind of magnetic tilt in the chest, a wee tug on the heartstring that felt both ancient and brand-new, something soft as warm bread and sharp as early heartbreak, and she never once saw it, never once looked my way except to borrow a pencil she’d never return, never once said my name except maybe to ask the teacher if she could move seats because Liam was kicking her chair and I wasn’t even Liam, I was just there, a background note in her schoolday music, the third drumbeat nobody hears.

     We had that playground—the concrete kingdom with its peeling painted circles and faded hopscotch maps—where the wind cut across the asphalt like a razor-thin dare, and I used to linger by the cold metal fence pretending I was strategizing football or waiting on friends when really I was stealing glances at her, watching her skip rope or whisper secrets to her pals or laugh at something I’d never be part of, and the whole scene felt staged by some cosmic trickster who wanted to teach me yearning long before I had the vocabulary to resist it.

     She wore her scarf knotted the way her mum taught her, neat and perfect, while mine was always slipping loose, trailing behind me like a defeated flag, and whenever she ran, her hair went this wild gold blur that made my chest bubble with awe, stupid awe, embarrassing awe, the kind that makes a boy stare at his own shoes because he knows he’s no match for that kind of brightness, no chance in hell of being the one she’d wait for at the school gates or save a seat for on the bus or even remember in ten years.

     Once, on a snowy January morning, she dropped the mitten off her right hand—navy blue with a wee star stitched at the cuff—and I picked it up, wanting to return it, wanting to say something gentle or clever or charming, but she’d already run ahead to join her friends, and I stood there holding that small scrap of wool like it was a relic from a saint, feeling the warmth she’d left behind evaporate in my palm, and I slipped it in my pocket, not out of creepiness but out of cowardice, because I couldn’t face her with a heart that loud.

     In class, she answered questions with that quiet confidence kids either inherit or learn from reading too many books at night, and I’d watch the way her eyes flickered to the window when she was thinking, as if the world outside the glass held the solutions to equations nobody else could solve, and I dreamed sometimes of sitting next to her, sharing textbooks, hearing her whisper explanations to me, but dreams in school grow from thin soil and most never bloom beyond the first bell.

     There was a day—aye, I remember it clear as the ink on my jotter—when she was chosen to read aloud in assembly, standing on the stage with her feet pigeon-toed, gripping the paper like it might float away if she loosened her fingers, and when she began to speak, her voice was steady, soft but steady, and I felt that ridiculous rush, that warm ache that starts in the stomach and rises like steam, and I thought, if she ever looked at me properly, just once, I’d turn into somebody worth looking at.

     But she didn’t. Not then, not ever. She read her bit, walked off the stage, sat with her friends, and the moment passed like all moments do when you’re invisible to the one you want most to see you.

     Years later—aye, years—her face still drifts into me at odd times: in the shine of a bus window, in the tilt of a stranger’s head, in the laugh of a woman passing by in the street, and it’s not longing anymore, not really, more like a soft echo, a wee gentle bruise the heart keeps as a souvenir from childhood, a reminder that the first people we love and lose shape us in ways we never fully admit. And sometimes, when the daylight hits right, when the city’s hustle goes quiet just enough for memory to push through, I think of that playground, that classroom, that mitten warming the cold pocket of my too-big blazer, and I know this: we don’t get over our first almost-love, we just fold it into ourselves, let it rustle like old paper whenever the wind remembers our name.