Always, Always, Always Believe In Yourself

Have you ever loved someone so much that you’d break your own heart for them?

love should never hurt, but here’s how it will hurt you: when you give your first love your heart, they’re going to take it in their hands and drop it. and you will be feeling the impact of the fall for months on end. eventually, it will fade from a constant ache to a pain that flares up like when someone who had broken a bone in the past feels pain when it storms. and some days, it will feel like a the rain will never stop but other days, it won’t necessarily be sunny but overcast and, more importantly, dry.

Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed. She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to. She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three. Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap. Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her. You say: I dated her a while back. You don’t say: Sometimes, when I’m holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume. You say: She was younger than me. You don’t say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered. You say: It’s nothing now. You don’t say: But it was everything then.