💘💿

The revelation was truly disheartening. The day you confessed to him, you were sixteen at the time. It had been a good day. A really good day, actually. The rays from the sun fell on Caleb’s face so perfectly that it was practically enough to convince you that the light had been a paid actor. You had gotten ice cream with him, and his flavor was so enviously delicious that you had more of his cone than your own. It had just been you two that day. You and Caleb. Caleb and you. At the time, it felt so right. This was the way things should have always been, all this time.

You decided that the only way to make a good day even better was to finally confess to him, once and for all, at a park bench. Just you and Caleb, and two ice cream cones. The perfect start to a high school sweetheart romance, one that’ll have all the critics raving at the sight.

That day, you fell into your feelings the same way it felt like falling into deep water–headfirst, breathless, and far before you even knew how to swim. But you dived into the pit anyway, hoping that Caleb would reciprocate in the form of saving you and bringing you back to shore.

(Spoiler alert: you drowned. So much for that. Unfortunately, the promised romcom quickly turned into a tragedy, and it was not pretty. His ice cream flavor that was so delicious that day became a repulsive one that you’d now avoid at all costs.)

MC had been your first friend and partner in crime for absolutely anything, but even she had a grimace on her face as she listened to you rant and cry and sob about her older brother. That night, over the phone, you called him so many names, to the point that you made her solemnly swear that your conversation with her would never see the light of day, let alone the ears of the source himself. The source, who, unfortunately, was still your childhood best friend and was still somebody you deeply cherished because of how much he cared about his younger sister. About his friends. About you, even though his blatant rejection made you second-guess everything that you knew about Caleb.

“I – I just don’t understand! Where did it all go wrong, MC?”

It was a rhetorical question, because frankly, she didn’t know either. MC had gone quiet on the other end of the phone a long time ago. At some point during your seemingly endless tirade about her brother’s stupidity, your sniffles, and the increasingly creative insults you’d hurled at Caleb’s name, she had simply listened. Occasionally, she’d make a small noise – a hum, a soft “yeah, I get it” (even though she really doesn’t; because what did you even see in her brother, anyway? It doesn’t seem like anything good, especially considering all of the names you’ve called him for the past hour). But for the most part, she let you spiral until eventually, your voice gave out.

The first thing to fizzle out of your body was the anger you felt. Then, the embarrassment crept in like a slow fever, and all you felt was a heavy mix of shame and sadness. You take another tissue from your third box tonight and wipe your tears, discarding it onto the seemingly neverending pile on your bed. And then, you sigh. A sigh of surrender, exhaustion, or what, you don’t know. You just do it.

“You can’t tell him,” you muttered, pressing the heel of your hand into your eyes. “Promise me you won’t tell him anything I said tonight. Please.”

“I wont,” she said, almost immediately. And that was that. Despite it all, you stay faithfully true to your word, and never mention that fateful day to him ever again. He never brought it up after, so neither did you. Surely, there was no elephant, no shaken-up soda can bursting at the seams waiting to be addressed after all of it, right?

The fact was already clearly written: Caleb did not like you, and that was that. There was no need to readdress this matter.

Surely, right?

Right, of course.