Pablo Espinoza Lafuente calls his poem «Sketch», and the title is a fair warning: nothing here is fully drawn. We get a few quick strokes of a boy and a girl, a radio, a street, and from them the poem builds the whole story of a first love: how it began, how it soured, how it dwindled into a wave. Its central idea is that a first love can be a wound and also the one place where you truly belonged, and that neither fact cancels the other.
The opening figures are drawn with wry precision. "A boy with a waistcoat on hand, / a girl with her workout grin": he is formal, a little old-fashioned, and she is sporty and grinning. Together they "built a complicity". The word is well chosen, since complicity belongs to accomplices who share a secret, and it suggests a private conspiracy against everyone else. Then comes the poem's best image. Love is learned "the way one intuits to mold a vessel," by instinct, like shaping clay. But the sentence turns on itself: they also use "the innocence's edge" to make "a chunk of it" and "to shatter on it." Innocence here is hard and brittle, and the lovers break against it. The vessel is made and broken in one breath, which is how the poem sees first love generally, with creation and damage arriving together.
Then the refrain. "That was the first love" stands alone on its line, flat and final, like a caption under a photograph. When it returns it has slipped into "That used to be the first love." The change is small but cruel. "Was" states a fact, while "used to be" admits that even the label "first love" is wearing thin. Memory is eroding its own title.
Between the two statements the tone sours. The pleasure of those years was "a pleasure for betraying us / as we would never do it again". That can be read as the lovers betraying each other, or as pleasure betraying them by being too intense to repeat, and the ambiguity seems deliberate. The radio gives a lovely adolescent detail, the restless hunt along the dial, until one dawn they wake "with rancor / dubious against whom or what." The word "dubious" is exact. The anger is real but has no clear target. Nobody committed an unforgivable act, and the love simply ended and left resentment hanging in the air. Risk, in the next stanza, is "a duty or a desperation, / and a matter of enjoying life." The list slides from obligation to need to pleasure, and the last item, looser and longer, feels like the truth the others were circling.
The ending is the quietest part. "Today a wave on the street / saves us from the idioms we use / to wish our separate happiness." I read the wave as a hand gesture that replaces the stock phrases people reach for when they have nothing left to say, such as "take care" or "be happy." Silence is kinder than cliché. "Separate happiness" is a gentle contradiction, since the two wish each other well but apart.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme, uneven lines, and stanzas that shrink into single sentences. It speaks as "we" and "us" until "But you should know that with you" turns abruptly to "you." The last line, plain after so much imagery, delivers the confession: "I was in the place I was supposed to be." No metaphor is left, only a statement. "Supposed to be" also echoes the earlier "duty." What felt like obligation then is recognized now as belonging.
The poem refuses both nostalgia and bitterness. It does not pretend the love was perfect or that its ending was painless, and it lets rancor, tenderness and gratitude sit side by side. For a young reader it shows how restraint can carry feeling. A refrain changed by one verb, and a final line with no decoration, say more than a flood of words would.