For smashing new website The Toast, Anne Helen Petersen writes about the particular exuberance of half-childish first love and—this is not a spoiler, it’s announced in the piece’s second paragraph—how she was wrenched into adulthood when her own first love died in Fallujah.
Petersen’s writing is so precise and understated that the emotions in the story become paradoxically even more devastating.
Read it right now, unless you’re at work or in class, because you’re definitely, definitely going to cry.
