it was not a love story
The first time I fell in love, felt that ache, that flutter in my chest, the whole knot in my stomach thing, well, to put it lightly, is not a love story, not even close. I mean it started out that way, romance and flowers, going on dates, getting the giddy feeling seeing them, but suddenly, not even gradually, it became more of a drama, or one could even say a horror film. I mean okay a little dramatic, but it was not the cute little love story you think of when you think of first loves. Love was always something I admired and wanted, almost needed at times, but never knew what it looked like. I lacked love and affectionate from that main male figure in my life I grew up with, so when it came to my first love, my ideas of it were quite skewed to say the least. I let my first love treat me like I was nothing, less than nothing, and it really broke me. He cheated on me time and time again, and I let him get away with it. I remember the first time, I have discussed it before, but not in detail, so here we go. We were at a party, it was halloween my senior year of high school. I was head over heels for this guy. We talked about marriage, and what we would name our kids, we talked about travelling the world together, only bags on our backs and nothing more. Then came that horrible night in which he quite literally had sex with a friend of mine, downstairs of this house party, while I was upstairs. She of course told people the day after, we were at our high school football game, and I confronted him and he denied it, even called her crazy. So there I am loving this boy, looking him right in the eyes, tears pushing their way onto my cheeks with a force I couldn’t control, as he lied to me. I even defended him and told her to stop spreading lies. He stayed with me, two whole days and nights, wouldn’t leave my side. But then we were in his old car, I put on a Stevie Wonder song. The window was down and the fall air was hitting my face. I could’ve let it go, but the idea of him and this girl, kissing, while he wore the shirt I bought him, circled my brain. After asking once more, in a way that made it seem like I already knew, I finally got it out of him. He told me what happened and started crying. Crying his pathetic eyes out as if it would change the fact that just days prior he looked at me and told me he loved me then fucked someone else while I was in the same house. He pulled over the car, the Stevie Wonder song still playing in my ears, I started to cry. You would think it would be the type of cry where I am sobbing on the ground, tears streaming down my face, trying to catch breaths in between, but nope, it was just a simple easy cry. Only a few tears trickled onto my sweater, as I looked at his red face as he begged for my forgiveness. Instead of being strong, and breaking up with him, I stayed with him. As he sat there crying, trying to hold my hand, I began to lose my breath. I opened the door to his shitty old car, on this empty back road, barefoot, and couldn’t breathe. It was the first time I couldn’t breathe like this. I was trying so hard to find air, but every time I opened my mouth it only got worse, almost like someone was suffocating me. Love shouldn’t feel like this, I thought. Love should feel good, and happy, love should make you smile and want to run into the arms of the person who has your heart. But instead I was standing there, cold feet, from the unpaved road, not being able to breathe. It was as if someone had jumped on top of my chest and any bit of air could no longer be found. I stood there, the door open, and everything kind of went blank. I couldn’t hear his sobs, his pleads, I just stood there staring at the mountains, at the roads, and thought of all the small people in the tiny houses. I bet they were eating dinner, that’s where we were heading before this happened, to his house to make dinner. I wanted to make pasta, I thought, but then I thought about how maybe I wanted grilled cheese. Yeah grilled cheese sounded good. Then suddenly I could breathe again, and the sound of his crying voice pierced my ears. I got back in the car slowly, shut the door, put another Stevie Wonder song on and we drove away, as if nothing happened. I wanted to yell, to cry, to tell him I hated him, but instead I sat there in silence. I think it was partly my ego that kept me with this guy, not wanting to admit that I was cheated on, while in the same house, WITH a friend of mine. Like really, how stupid could you be to not know what was happening just a floor below you. Or wow you must really be THAT repulsive that this guy felt the need to hook up with someone else, WHILE you were there, my god. Those thoughts were tearing apart my sanity, but what also came to mind was, you know, this is it, maybe you deserve this, and maybe this is what love is. That when things arise, problems, pain, you simply look past them. So that's what I did, I looked past it. I bit my tongue, told my friends he never cheated, and continued to be a doting girlfriend as if he didn’t just rip my heart in two. I didn’t let him touch me for months, that was his ~punishment~ in a way I guess, which probably led him to stray yet again (though I didn’t find out until much later) but eventually, of course, I did. There would be nights he would yell and scream if I opposed his advances, and to calm his anger down I always gave in, always while wiping the tears off my cheeks in hope that he wouldn’t see. Once he did, a tear fell onto his hand, so he stopped, got up, and sat there for a few minutes in silence before yelling at me for crying and “for making him feel like a bad guy” then fell asleep with his arms wrapped around me and the sound of his breath in my ear. I saw love as almost a type of suffering that you had to put up with in order to feel just a small ounce of happiness again. Because there were those small ounces of real love that still appeared. I mean granted I don’t think he ever truly loved me, but I sure as hell loved him, (which scares me to think I could love someone who was so cruel). After days of feeling worthless, feeling skeptical and scared I would come home and he would have dinner or flowers waiting for me, and we would stay up and watch the sunrise alone, and all the love I felt in those beginning days was back. For just a second I was able to forget all the pain he had caused me and continued to cause me. Once he cheated, and saw my reaction it only made it worse too. He would go out of his way to try and make me jealous, would get angry if he talked to a girl and I didn’t react poorly. He loved it. He loved to see me scared, he loved to see me want him. After we finally came to an end, which was long overdue, the thought of love and of relationships horrified me. If a guy remotely showed interest I would be repulsed. Or if I showed interest, my brain would turn it off within minutes of him being nice to me. I feared relationships, I feared intimacy, I feared the thought of me falling in love again only to be crushed the way he crushed me. This went on for quite some time, years actually. I would hook up with people, feel nothing, or feel something, and either way be turned off from either of those feelings. Especially when they started to care about me. Or if they didn’t I would pine after them in order to prove to myself that I was worth it. Eventually I started letting myself have small relationships again. Nothing serious, but the classic, no strings type deal. The whole if they text you they text you, if they don’t, it’s fine. Or the ones that would only text you to come over so they could tear your clothes off then send you back home in the middle of winter nights. I started to hate these situations, there had to be more to it, right? I didn’t want to admit that I was still hurting from that first heartbreak, but I was. I didn’t let people in, or I fell for these guys who didn’t give two shits about me. Eventually I decided that maybe it was time to actually date again. Of course though, I was only into the guys that didn’t want to date, that wanted to have me as a body when they needed, but keep me in their phones as just another string of numbers they text on the weekends. My perception of love only became worse. I started carelessly giving my love to these guys that didn’t want it. I wasn’t even in love with these people, I just simply wanted to feel something again, to feel that little spark that had been taken away from me. I think that the first love really defined the rest for me. Instead of seeing my worth, I let people into my life, gave them affection, gave them security and none of them deserved it.I think I was giving so much of myself and my love because I wanted a redo. I wanted to remake the whole idea of love in my eyes because of how poorly the first one went. I wished that I could take it all back, wished that I never met that guy, but since that was impossible, I needed to pretend it didn’t happen, and start again. So here I am finding guys who were not much better than that first guy and romanticizing them. Making them into these amazing wonderful people, when in reality, to put it lightly, they fucking sucked. As every new small ~relationship~ was failing I wondered if I truly knew how to love anymore. The only real example I had was so painful, so horrible, did I really even know how to love in the first place? Was that love, I wondered? Could something that made my heart hurt more than I could ever imagine, actually be love, or did I simply never know what love was?
Now this leads up to my current situation. I am head over heels for this boy, you know, ~my crush~ I like to talk about. Well, he is nothing like any of these people, and he is literally the opposite of that first love guy. He treats me well, he cares, he puts the same amount of effort I put, he asks me how I am, and doesn’t make me feel like I am nothing. Yet somehow I still have moments of doubt. I still wonder if I am doing it right. Or if I even know how. I try not to overthink and let myself just feel things, but I get lost in thought, especially when it comes to love. I worry that what if the same thing happens again, that I am here loving him, and he looks at me, tells me he loves me, but goes downstairs after kissing me on the cheek to go fuck one of my friends. Of course that is a very particular situation, but you get what I mean. How can I let myself fully go, and feel all the love that I am feeling, without this nagging fear in the back of my head telling me not to trust him. It overcomes me sometimes, that fear, and I picture him, his pink lips blurry, and a smile that feels distant, like a childhood memory. Then I picture him in love, but not with me, with a girl whose hair is the color after a storm, whose eyes could fill oceans, like the ones we used to talk about. But now he talks to her, while their hands are swinging loosely by their sides, as they walk around his town, the one I never got to know. I think these thoughts and they hurt, they hurt my heart, even though it’s all in my fucking head. He is nothing but nice to me, yet I can still see this happening. And maybe I can blame that first love, “he really fucked you up huh?”, a guy once said to me, or maybe I learned about love and now think about it, is not the way it should be. I want to be in the moment, to love and love deeply, and with my whole heart, and to feel all the amazing feelings that come with it. And I do, I let that happen, I let the butterflies swarm, and the knot gets tighter, uncontrolled smiles when I see his face, tears when he leaves. But then I sit here alone, thinking of how no matter what he’s gonna hurt me, and I get so scared. I always say not to let the fear of heartbreak prevent me from loving with my whole entire heart, and I try not to let it. Yet I still have this thought in the back of my head, when he looks me in the eyes and tells me how he feels, part of me thinks he must be lying. That no way this kid is being honest and upfront, that some part of him is like everyone else, everyone that saw me as just a naked body, who’s face had no name. I wonder if I’ll ever get over this? I wonder if I’ll ever be able to just love and be loved and not focus on the fear of heartbreak, not focus on how painful this ~could~ be, and most likely will be. Will I ever think positively about love, or will it always be something that is packed with pain? Maybe that guy was right in what he said, in that, that guy, my first love, yeah, he really fucked me up, huh?
