It happens like this:
You’re in a room with a boy you love and life is great.
The scenery changes every so often and you’re showered with forehead kisses, compliments on the way you think more than the way you look, long talks of hopes, dreams and fears, and spending weekends meeting all of his friends because he can’t wait to show you off.
And you meet his mom and she likes you, you meet his brothers who nod in approval, and you meet his dad when he walks in on the two of you having an intense make-out session on his couch.
You connect on levels you never have with another human being and it is amazing. Topics involving music, movies, what you felt during those movies and music, and outlooks on life are paired with gasps, “Yes, exactly!” and the feeling of relief when you find someone who finally gets it exactly without the hassle of shameful explanation.
He. Gets. All. Of. It.
He makes you laugh with every joke and every moment you spend being silly together.
And he’s real.
‘He’s real,’ you tell yourself after you question that feeling of happiness every time he does something amazing.
He sends you letters of how much he loves you and why he loves you and how that love, specifically, will help him get through tough times.
Let’s say, that tough time is graduate school.
Graduate school he has to complete for four years and on the other side of the country.
And you both believe your love is so strong that it is exactly what will help when he leaves.
Until he no longer believes it.
It happens like this:
You’re in a room with a boy you love and you’re unbelievably happy.
The scene of the room turns into a park.
A specific park where you confessed your feelings for each other—spent hours together before one of you had to go to class, it’s the same park where you spent hours under the night sky telling secrets you had never told anyone but your absolute best friend.
‘But how does it feel to know that I don’t know if I want to be together when I’m away,’ he asks after he tells you tales of the most studious and undistracted student you have ever met.
No one can disrupt his study habits: not even dinners with his mother or absolute best friends.
Doesn’t that say it enough for you?
‘How does that feel?’ He asks three more times before you finally get it.
‘I mean it doesn’t feel the greatest, but I understand you have a lot of things to think through,’ you reason. Because he does, he has a new life to think about and that’s scary. Aren’t we all afraid to grow up?
And you say everything you would as a friend and a supportive girlfriend because you don’t want to get in the way and you want to encourage him to do his best through grad school, and even in life.
‘Give us a little more credit,’ you say to him when he worries the ones he loves will shun him for being too busy.
But you won’t really understand that part until way later because he knows his friends will always stick by his side—it’s just you he doesn’t want there.
It happens like this:
In just a few seconds, the scene turns from the park to gray. There are no gray skies, no thunderstorms, no harsh winds. You’ve just redecorated to everything in gray scale.
It’s just a gray room with a gray door.
He’s leaving.
And just as he’s leaving, he looks back at you with sad eyes as he closes the door.
‘I’m sorry’ is printed all over his face.
But you’re still sitting there, to what used to be patchy green grass where a tree towered right above you for shade.
You’re still trying to make sense out of everything that happened.
The door finally closes.
You’ll spend days and weeks and maybe even some months in this room, with the door unlocked—hopeful that he might make his way back in and say he made a huge mistake, bringing color and light back into the room.
'Change the scenery.’
It happens like this:
You fall apart every hour of the day because you can’t stop thinking about the many ways he has broken your heart.
Yes, even the moments that made your heart swoon and swear on your lucky stars you found true happiness—those will hurt the most.
You’ll feel that none of it makes sense.
How could something that felt so undeniably and incredibly true, just turn out to be something so uncertain?
But don’t worry, you will have your moments when you forget to think about it and sometimes recalling them won’t even rile up the tornado of pain.
You feel a little guarded and can exhale and be ok.
Other times, you won’t be so lucky.
You’ll suck in your breath as you bite your tongue to stop yourself from saying his name.
It’s like holding your heart in your hand and squeezing it every so often like it’s some kind of stress reliever.
That pressure is always there.
And you’ll let the battle continue within, and you’ll be at lunch with people having fun and laughing all around you, but you’re too busy thinking of the best and worst moments and fighting the attack of tears threatening to tear you down.
And then it stops.
And then the process begins all over again.
It happens like this:
One day, without any warning at all, you’ll find yourself in a hallway lined with doors along each side, some closed and some opened.
You see the one that had just closed a few weeks before, with his name printed in the center.
It has been 34 days and you’ve spent all of those days thinking in the past, present and future.
But more in the past and future with the “I miss” and the “What ifs.” The present consisted of “This hurts, I can’t believe he’s gone.” So you try not to go there that much.
And then you start to let go of the future because there’s no need to bank on things that aren’t guaranteed to happen.
You had spent 34 days hoping for days like that.
The past still shakes you up, but it doesn’t evoke the same wave of tears and you can fend off some of the daggers that shoot to your heart.
Here’s the thing about hope.
Because you haven’t exactly let go of it, you just placed it somewhere else.
The saying, “If you love something, let it go. And if it comes back to you, then it’s true” echoes through you.
And maybe that’s true, but you’re still hurt by the pain with that “hope.”
So you place your hope where it matters the most: in you.
You’re broken, you’ve been shot to pieces and everything you believed in has been shifted so bad, you can’t find the right sense in anything.
In order to get better, you need to make changes.
So you get up, with a body that’s just in the very beginning stages of recovery, and walk towards the door with his name on it.
You’ve gone through this door a few times during absolute desperate times for attention in the last 34 days, only to shred your heart into a million more pieces.
His mind hasn’t changed and you need to understand that.
You place your hand on the knob and put the other right above another function, the lock.
Take a deep breath and try your best to see the good in everything.
'Be thankful; here’s to a new life experience; at least you got to feel all of that happiness,’ you say back and forth in your head trying to convince yourself to do it.
And with one right move, you turn the lock.
Hoping for the best of all that was left behind.
It happens like this:
You’re in a room with a person you love.
Someone who has seen your good days, your dark days, and gray skies.
And even when you’ve threatened to cut them off completely, they’ve stuck around.
'It’s not the end all be all,’ they say as they stand their ground with you.
Bruised knees, shaky limbs, broken heart and all.
They’ve let you cry yourself to sleep even though you knew you had to stop, they listened to the harsh words you convinced yourself to believe, and they let you feel the pain that eventually left you numb.
Your body was still there, oxygen still flowed through you, and your heart was still very much alive and beating.
But as far as you knew it, you were dead.
And so, piece by piece and with time that seemed to go by fast and slow at the very same time—the person you love helped you recover.
'You will be ok,’ they say to you in the mirror.
Your eyes may be puffy, your heart may be sore, and you might have exhausted yourself out of talking about your heartbreak.
Why was it, when you were so ready to give up, you were still forced to see another day?
'You can’t stay here,’ the one you love tells you every time you find yourself wanting to go back to that black hole.
Piece by piece and day by excruciating day, you start to feel whole again.
You think about that closed door a lot less than you did and you feel more accepting than you did.
Your body is still here, oxygen continues to flow through you, and your heart is still very much alive and beating.
It starts like this:
You’re in a room with someone you love.
And that someone is you.
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