The past has a nasty little habit of creeping back into your life when you least expect it. It does not ring the bell, it does not send a calendar invite, and it certainly does not ask permission. It just shows up. Sometimes in a smell. Sometimes in a place. Sometimes in an old song played on a friend’s prehistoric music device. For me, it arrived in the form of a song that dragged me headfirst into a wormhole leading straight back to the frozen, awkward, glorious ruins of my first love.
And what a love it was.
She was dark. Mysterious. Silent. Complicated. She had presence. Not in the cinematic slow-motion way where violins explode in the background, but in that strange, intellectual, slightly dangerous way that makes you look twice and then spend the next six months pretending you are not curious.
I had seen her many times around campus. She was always there, but never really there. Distant. Unbothered. Immune to social enthusiasm. The kind of girl who would stand in the corner while the rest of the campus ran after loud, cheerful, strawberry-flavored nonsense with matching accessories.
So no, it was not exactly love at first sight.
It was worse.
It was fascination.
The kind that enters through the eye, rents a room in the brain, and starts rearranging furniture.
There was something about her I could not explain. Something that made the air around her feel different. I had no words for it then. To be honest, I barely have words for it now. It was not attraction in the ordinary sense. It was admiration laced with confusion, curiosity mixed with danger, and just enough ego to make me think I could understand her.
Which, as history repeatedly proves, is how young men ruin themselves.
The problem was that not many people on campus liked her. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, she did not like many people on campus.
This, of course, made her even more attractive.
Nothing inflates romantic stupidity faster than rejection by the masses. The moment society says, “Not our type,” some idiot somewhere will whisper, “Perfect. She is meant for me.”
That idiot was me.
Naturally, before approaching her, I did what any sensible and emotionally unstable young man would do.
I conducted research.
I did not go around directly asking people about her like some love struck census officer. No, no. I was far more subtle than that. I harvested information organically. I lurked through cafeteria conversations, library whispers, lab gossip, and those random corridor debates that begin about academics and somehow end in character assassination.
That, my friends, is the real art of intelligence gathering. You do not ask, “Do you know her?” That raises eyebrows. Instead, you wait for her name to float by naturally and then casually lean into the discussion as though you have a broad academic interest in human complexity, just for research purpose(*wink).
It is all very refined.
A sort of emotional espionage.
Much safer than launching an open survey and accidentally starting rumors of “something brewing” before you have even exchanged a proper hello. Premature gossip can kill a romance before it is born. Like an investigation, but with worse haircuts.
Anyway, the verdict from the campus was unanimous.
“Weird.”
“Complicated.”
“Gloomy.”
“Very 1980s.”
“Not our type.”
Now, was I surprised that 75% of the campus preferred bright, cheerful, low-maintenance options with decorative personalities and fashionable noise levels? Not really.
But that was precisely why she stood out.
She was not for everyone.
She was for the patient. The curious. The mentally unstable.
She was for me.
By second year, fate — or the timetable department — placed us together. Same class. Same lab. Same academic ecosystem. And every time I brought her into conversation, I got the same expression from my classmates: a mix of pity, confusion, and the kind of face people make when you tell them you enjoy unpaid internships.
For some, she was too difficult. For others, impossible to understand. One fellow declared, with the confidence only ignorance can provide, that she “speaks in Namibian bush language”
But I saw something else.
I saw brilliance. Depth. Attitude. Precision. Madness with structure. She was the kind of presence that did not flatter stupidity. She demanded effort. She required patience. She was not here to entertain fools.
Naturally, I was enchanted.
I still remember our first conversation.
I said, “Hi.”
And what I got back was the emotional equivalent of a refrigerator light.
Cold. Unforgiving. Possibly judgmental.
I nearly died on the spot.
But first encounters are always awkward. The brain, faced with unfamiliar beauty and rising panic, starts throwing internal exceptions like badly written code. Everything becomes fuzzy. Words lose shape. Timing collapses. Dignity packs a suitcase and leaves.
Still, we got along. Slowly. Painfully. Respectfully.
I could feel the ice thawing.
She was stubborn, so I stayed calm.
She liked perfection, so I matched it.
She demanded attention, so I gave it.
Go ahead, call me a pushover. I have no defense. Love is rarely dignified in its early stages. You do not negotiate with your first love. You adapt. You suffer. You learn.
And I learned.
I learned that behind the frost was a strange tenderness. Behind the resistance was a test. She did not open up for everyone. She wanted someone who would understand her strange moods, her hard edges, her complicated logic, and the wreckage of whatever mysterious past had made her this way.
And somehow — by luck, persistence, or divine administrative error — I was the one who got through.
I understood her.
I figured her out.
I broke the spell.
We connected.
Her rule was simple: know me properly, treat me right, and I will treat you better.
My God, when she responded, she responded beautifully.
And those little winks.
I still remember them.
We spent nearly all our time together in the lab, working through issues, building things, suffering beautifully in silence. My coffee conversations began to have her flavor. My friends noticed. Of course they noticed. Men are useless at many things, but they can smell obsession from across a corridor.
Some pitied me.
Some encouraged me.
Some looked at me the way villagers look at a man who insists on petting a tiger.
But she and I kept going.
Smooth cruise.
Or so I thought.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
We may experience turbulence.
It was project submission season — that festive time in student life when sleep becomes mythology and deodorant becomes diplomacy. I had backlogs. I had pressure. I had exactly one day left for testing and running my source code before submission and live demo.
One day.
One.
So we took permission from the department head to stay in the lab and finish the project overnight. Burn the midnight oil, as people used to say back when oil was cheap and optimism was legal.
That meant just the two of us in the lab all night.
Well, technically not alone. The security guy existed. But I was fairly certain he would disappear for tea, cigarettes, snacks, philosophy, or whatever mysterious rituals security staff perform after midnight.
The point is: we had the night.
And what a night it was.
I went to the console, played a song through the multimedia setup, and let the moment take over. The air conditioner hummed. The servers murmured like old priests. The keyboard clacked with sacred urgency. Code compiled. Screens glowed. Deadlines trembled in the distance.
We were close.
I touched her.
She was warm.
I kept my palm against her side and she trembled gently under the pressure. Her hums felt heavy. She did not resist.
How could she?
It was a beautiful night. Cold air, mechanical music, machine breath, unfinished dreams, and two souls trying to outrun a deadline together. It was not romance in the normal sense. It was better. It was nerd love — sweaty, sleep-deprived, under fluorescent lights, and hanging by a UPS that had the emotional stability of a biscuit.
By 5:00 a.m., we had done it.
The project was complete.
I was ecstatic.
I backed everything up to a floppy disk — yes, a floppy disk, that small sacred plastic relic from a civilization more innocent and less cloud-dependent than yours.
Then I walked out, informed security, and headed to my buddy’s apartment for a shower and a change of clothes.
I was tired.
I was triumphant.
Because the next morning, I walked in and saw two people standing near her.
That is never a good sign.
I felt my soul sit down.
“What happened?” I asked. “What happened to her”
One of them looked up and said, with the calm brutality of a man discussing weather, “UPS tripped. Your lady love is not booting.”
No.
No no no no no.
Not today.
Not today.
Then came the follow-up stab to the liver.
“Your project was on this, right?”
Was it on this?
Was my project on this?
My brother in betrayal, my project, my database, my effort, my dignity, my future, my oxygen — everything was on this.
I had backup, yes. But backup is like health insurance: comforting in theory, useless in the first three seconds of panic.
I stood there in horror while one of my classmates, in a tone I still consider grounds for unfriending, said, “See dude, in Visual Basic with Windows all we need is a connection string and some OCX controls. Easy to reconfigure.”
Easy to reconfigure?
Easy?
Sir, I was witnessing the collapse of my first love and you were pitching Windows like a used-car salesman in a funeral home.
“SHUT UP!” I said, with the passion of a man watching both romance and academic stability die in real time.
And that was the end of it.
My first love.
UNIX.
She crashed during a power fluctuation.
Even now, after all these years, after all the systems I’ve touched, after all the operating systems that came and went wearing prettier interfaces and making easier promises, she remains the one.
The one that bit-flipped my heart.
The one that made complexity attractive.
The one that did not smile at everyone.
The one that required patience, attention, sacrifice, and just enough madness to appreciate properly.
My first love was not a girl.
She was UNIX.
Dark. Moody. Brilliant. Misunderstood. Difficult. Elegant. A complete disaster for beginners and a divine revelation for the committed.
And like all great first loves, she taught me one unforgettable lesson:
Never trust electricity, backup plans, or your own emotional stability around a beautiful operating system.
“Never trust electricity, backup plans, or your own emotional stability around a beautiful operating system” – Sorcerer