She, technically speaking, was a first for me. The hot summer after my seventh grade year and the barely air-conditioned Waltham dance studio provided the backdrop to my first crush on a girl after coming to terms with my sexuality. 

She leaned back on her hands and her legs extended in front of her, unapologetically taking up space, with an air of elegance and the type of confidence that tricks everyone into thinking it comes easily and leaves people in awe. She wore a pair of athletic shorts with a sheer black sleeveless shirt over a dappled blue-gray crop top. I probably already knew that day that whenever I looked at her, I saw another girl, not her, who wore a dappled blue-gray swimsuit underneath black athletic shorts, with a pair of plastic-framed glasses, a kind grin, and hands that “looked like salami” after doing headstands. Who I saw, if it bears repeating, was not actually her. And yet, I let the ill-advised infatuation blossom.

My infatuation was like a short-lived, spectacularly burning flame that had enough beauty to move the heavens. At the same time, it was a cause for shame, for hiding. It was ignited out of nothing, out of nowhere, and fought for its right to exist much more ferociously and passionately than I’d ever expected. It consumed my thoughts and caused my brain to think about her, and then to think and then think and then think again. It created something that possessed me with a strong, maddening desire to unveil and shout it to the world and, at the same time, to snuff it out, to choke it to death with my bare hands, stamping it out vigorously and savagely and never letting it see a sliver of daylight.

No matter what, something born from nothing was, at the end of the day, nothing, and after summer concluded, it died down and left only ashes behind. Still, it branded a scar on my heart, making me swear an oath that I would never forget its ill-lived existence. Never once during its time did I dare to speak a word of it. It was born in silence, suffered in silence, and died in silence. 

It was ill-lived not only because of the words I’d been too afraid to say, but also because it had been a mistake to like her in the first place. The mistake I had made was to take her for someone else whom I’d liked before, an old friend. My mind convinced me that what I couldn’t see underneath her mask would look similar to my old friend’s face. It came as quite a startling surprise when I saw her actual face, with softer curves and a milder appearance, for the first time, over Zoom, on a day when the rain fell in torrents, determined to stir up a flood and drown us all, when the wind blew wildly and without restraint, threatening to cut my connection to the Internet at any moment. This must’ve been the start of my realization that perhaps I, from the beginning, had not liked her, but rather the shadow of my old friend I saw in her.

However, to like (or dislike) one’s idea of someone else as I did isn’t, actually, all that uncommon. In contrast, one of my favorite stories from Chinese legends is the story of the zhiyin (知音), which describes two people whom Westerners may describe as soulmates. One of them is a master of the guqin, an ancient Chinese instrument, and the other is the only one in the world who truly understands his playing. After the guqin master’s friend’s death, the guqin master smashed his instrument and swore never to play again, for there was no one else in the world worth playing for now that his good friend was dead.

The people we meet in this fleeting lifetime cannot be counted, and we will become friends with only a precious few, and such a connection of mutual deep understanding, if possible, is even rarer. Most people we meet we only have a shallow understanding of, and when talking about them and thinking about them we reference our idea of them, which oftentimes is nothing close to how they actually are. How many people, then, in this life, will we judge and misjudge without understanding at all?