I understand. You’re hurt. After a month of fighting and doing things you didn’t want to do, you guys finally broke up. Your first relationship is over, and not on terms that you wanted. She texted you. She told you he cheated on you. She told you it was with her.
I know you’re lying in bed, right now, feeling pretty numb. You’ll do this until school starts and you’re forced to get up, stopping your existence of YouTube videos and a single snack bag of Lays Baked potato chips a day. You’re thinking about how you’re going to see them in school, doing everything you guys used to do together. Your mom will spend the night with you because she’s worried you might hurt yourself over this.
You’re hurt. I understand. He was your first kiss, your first date, and your first boyfriend. Your parents liked him and he got along well with your dog. You thought nothing could be better than him.
You’ll spend some time every day of your first month back crying in the nurse’s office because some small thing in your AP language class reminded you of him. You’ll hide yourself outside of your choir class until someone finds you crying. And as his graduation approaches, you’ll cry even more because he’s leaving and you still aren’t over him. You’re hurt. You’ll understand.
After he graduates, a mutual friend will invite both of you to hang out with him and that night will end with you two talking in his car about what went wrong at two in the morning. This talk will be on the exact date you guys broke up the year previous. You will remember this date by heart.
You’ll talk for a little bit after that night. The conversations will take place solely over Snapchat, and never last longer than three weeks before one of you gets mad at the other. He’ll apologize for cheating on you, then say he never cheated on you a week later. You’ll learn to stop listening to him when he brings either of them up. You’ll take pride when he messages you first. You’ll convince yourself that he still needs you. He doesn’t.
After the off-and-on friendship with him, you’ll both give up. You’ll realize you can never be friends with someone you were in love with, whether that’s how he feels about the situation or not. You’ll still care about him, no matter how much you don’t want to. You won’t want any harm to come to him, even if you aren’t wishing him the best.
Even four years later, any time you hear his name, you’ll wince a little. Anytime someone brings up something that he liked, you’ll be sad. It’s hard to forget the first person you ever loved, no matter how badly they treated you. But you’ll learn more from this heartbreak than you did your whole relationship with him, and you’ll come out a better and stronger person.
You’ll understand. You’re not hurt anymore.
