For The Summer Love I Learned From

“Every time I close my eyes, it’s like a dark paradise. No one compares to you.”- Lana Del Rey

I don’t know when it started.

At first, I was completely content with how we first began, we were at the beautiful beginning. It felt like the shying first steps to a melodic waltz, as if we were about to write a tale as old as time, and our ending wouldn’t need a broken curse or an enchanted rose, we were magic all by ourselves. I couldn’t believe it, what I saw in his eyes; I couldn’t believe I saw something that only existed in books, and Disney movies, honesty.

It started off innocent, like every other love story does.

Yet, I never expected it to go so far.

I never expected that our roles would switch, or that my pen would falter at the breath of his name.

I never expected to be the first to fall, when I was always afraid of heights.

It began as a summer love, and there are always stories about summer loves, and how they never last. They were only meant for the brief time-span of late night kisses among fireflies, and crushed bodies in blankets of sands, all just a well-spun realistic fairytale, if one ever existed. I loved to live my life according to such fantasies, because the thought of growing up into a person torn from her imaginings, stripped of her ink soaked swords, and picked up off her pink-colored clouds was a sad idea I couldn’t let the world touch. I used to see the answers to everything so clearly, they used to all be so obvious, what I wanted a character to say, or how I wanted a scene to end, until they started conflicting with what I really wanted. For a long time, I didn’t know that what I wanted most was to be loved.

When you start to fall in love, you blind yourself to what’s right and what’s wrong; you start to see white as black, and black as white, and your vision can not see past his.

That’s right.

I fell in love.

It’s a real shame though.

You only start to realize such a thing, when you start to make excuses for all his mistakes.

Now, I think I realized the moment I fell in love with him was that night on the jungle gym. Boys dribbling a basketball on the court behind us, like background noise, the entire world around me was just static to the dream in front of me. He had done everything so right, like I said, it was the perfect beginning. If only he had intended to keep going as he first started, maybe we wouldn’t have had an ending.

I was playing around the jungle gym, climbing the stairs, going down slides, trying to remember what it was like to be a kid, see where my innocence vanished and follow where all the years went. I was wondering how did I go through my teenage years without feeling this wanted? Was I so used to being alone, that I never wondered what it was like to love? In all the books I’ve read, was I never curious about the first kisses? About the beauty of loving someone other than yourself and being given the same in return? Or had I seen too much of the consequences of letting someone complete you, that I refused to let myself fall victim to the same sad fate? I’ve seen it in my parents, in my friends, in everyone I’ve ever cared about, and it killed me to watch them all lose a part of themselves in the process, it would destroy me to see the same sadness in myself.

I always felt that if I ever did fall for someone, it would be for a book lover like me. I figured he would be sweet, shy, and have dark hair and light eyes. I knew for a fact, that I wasn’t going to be dating any bad boys anytime soon, because honestly, as if they would ever give me the time of day, and as if I would give them even a second from a plastic rubber watch.

Yet..

I changed that night, when he climbed up the jungle gym, and stopped me in mid-sentence.

As cheesy and cliche’ as this is going to sound, the world had gone still. I had slipped from my thoughts, and the crazy college story I was telling died on my lips the second his touched them.

And my heart melted, like all the books said it would, when he cupped my cheek in the palm of his hand, deepening the very kiss that would start it all.

And that was it.

That was all it took.

And God, I was so damn stupid.

The beginnings are always the best because that’s when they try the hardest, it’s near the climax, where the prince act starts to falter and you start to see the clinks in their armor. You see the rust behind the silver, the hidden smirk behind the sweet smile, the price tag hanging off the cheap roses, and the time you wasted on looking at a hero, who was really a villain.

The middle of our story was where conflict began.

We no longer spent nights walking around the park, or along the shores of the beach.

I still remember how I would trip over the sand one night, and he held my hand tight the entire time. Even offered to carry me that night, and sometimes I still wish I had let him.

The nights we spent talking till’ morning had died down, and the silence at two am became louder than before. We used to talk from four o’ clock pm to eight in the morning, the next day. Whether it be random jokes, or silly questions, I fell into the conversations so easily, so naturally, that it scared me how well the words came. I felt like I didn’t have to play games, or try so hard because we both knew what we wanted, and at the moment, I thought that was each other, but of course I was wrong…Whether it was about anime or about the tiny stories of ourselves, the teenage years, the days on the playground, we traded parts of ourselves to each other like Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and it killed me to realize that we would throw it all away after only two months. Maybe I was the stupid one to think that he would want to stay, that his eyes wouldn’t wonder off to a better prize than the one in front of him; that he wouldn't find someone he wanted more than me.

I had become the awful cliche I never wanted to be;

I became the story I was afraid to become,

and it almost ended me.

It took me a while to pick up my laptop and start writing it all down, because to write about him , it meant reliving the moments I had with him, and I couldn’t do that to my broken heart. It would break the only shattered pieces of me I had left, and even now, my broken heart is still breaking as I type each word, each letter, and it’s like slowly walking through shattered glass. The remembering is always the hardest part, it’s what always leaves me raw and scarred, with a gaping hole still swallowing in painful gallons of air and time. It’s in the moments you’re alone that threaten the stability of your healing foundation; the loving pedestal you slowly built for yourself when he pushed you off his. It’s harder when you don’t see his name pop on your screen anymore, with kissing faces and hearts around it, when you realize it hurts every single time anyone even whispers his name, it’s like a bullet not to just your heart, but to your soul. The shot echoes throughout you, and you are cracked from within, and can’t reach what a careless boy broke inside you.

And my boy, he broke everything.

I had taken so many punches to the heart, to my mind, for a storm that claimed to want me, but wrecked me instead. I was trying to find love in a hurricane, and no matter how hard I tried to calm his thunder, I was always stroke down by his lightening instead. Sometimes the marks his bolts left on the armor of my heart still hiss in smoke around the cruel words I still don’t know if he meant. Maybe his past wounds were too much for me to fix, or maybe he wanted something I couldn’t give him, even though I was willing to give him everything.

Yet, even though he broke my heart, I learned to love myself instead. Despite the cliff he pushed me off of, I still hanged on to the edge. Actually, not only did I hang on, I pulled myself up. I decided then and there, that I didn’t need saving from anyone, especially not from him. I finally realized I was always capable of the love denied to me, I was just looking for it in the wrong places.

I know now, that he was a lesson I needed to learn. Sometimes we have to discover that self worth must come from within, it can not be given, and that one’s happiness can not be burdened on anyone’s shoulders, except our own. I understand now that not everyone is capable of giving us the love we deserve, and that sometimes, that capability must lie in ourselves first. We don’t determine whether or not if we are worthy love, we are always worthy of such a gift, it is those who we give it to, that we must decide are worthy of it or not. We don’t have to make ourselves perfect for anyone, or adjust the settings of what we are to fit their standards, they have to fit ours first. I don’t know, maybe I’ll find someone who reaches my standards, I thought he did, but it’s okay to be wrong, the important lesson is that I learn from such a fall.

I can see why they call it “falling in love”. You are letting go of all your fears, leaving yourself exposed in mid-air for any other heart to touch, waiting with the sky to see if he jumped and fell in right after you. Falling in love is the inch past the edge of the cliff; the single breath before the drop, and that’s how it feels the entire time I was with him, I’m a breath away, a life away from the longest fall, and I’m suspended in mid-air, in mid-second in that moment of forever.

However, I’ve risen from my fall, and grew wings made of steel.

My summer love,

You may have broken a piece of me, but I remade myself into someone who deserves more than what you gave me.

Sincerely,

The Girl Who Left Her Summer Paradise Behind