Three long years have passed, yet I still remember it so well. Oh, how I adored you then, my First Love, with a fierce and burning passion! But alas, our time alone together was so brief…

Since then, many other women have loved you – held you, stroked you, thrilled as you enfolded them with your warm and gentle touch. I know because they have written to me, proclaiming their love for you, flaunting pictures, shamelessly discussing you in the Ravelry Forums… And I was not jealous – well, maybe just a little – but more than that I was proud to see you invoke the same passion in them that we once shared.

There have been others for me as well, since our time together - I am not ashamed to admit it - many shawls of alluring sizes, shapes, and colors. And though I have loved them all in different ways and am grateful for the lessons they taught me, none of them meant quite what you meant to me, because you were the first.

And so, while I know we have both moved on since our time together, an overwhelming urge has been building in me to see you again, to tenderly recreate those embryonic stitches, to fondly traverse the paths of Nemosuke’s original charts – but in a new and glorious way. I was a novice in the ways of shawl design three years ago, yet you were generous enough to forgive my ignorance and somehow come out as lovely as you did (or maybe it was the Malabrigo “Silky Merino”). But I have learned from my experiences with all those other shawls…

I can now mold you and shape you into a new embodiment of your former self - I can take you in my hands and let our love grow in ways never dreamt of before. And I will not stop until I feel you lovingly curve around me once again, but this time in the wide crescent shape I was too naïve to create three years ago.

So come back to me, my First Love - come into my lap and let me hold you as I once did, but with a foreknowledge to make our love bittersweet. Say that you remember, and let us share secrets in the quiet, while we may. I know others will have you when our time together is done, but for now, you are Mine Once More.