“I was prepared but it still hurt.”

   I don't even know where to begin, to be honest. It’s not exactly easy getting one’s feelings down on paper, especially when those feelings are something like love. 

    I thought I was an exception to those feelings, far above the rest of the crowd of teenagers that surrounded me on a daily basis. I realize, looking back, maybe I was just shielding myself from the inevitable fate of the average adolescent: Heartbreak, loss, rejection. Feelings in general I... actively avoided. I thought I was being smart, being a step above the crowd, by not feeling. How wrong I was. In retrospect, it was a mistake. because when the pain, the love, the pure emotion hit me... I didn’t know what to do. I froze.
    I think I’m still frozen.
    Like I said, I don’t even know how to go about telling this story, but a good place to start might be the beginning. I feel I have to warn you. There is no happy ending for our trusty heroine. There is no magical solution where everything turns out okay. This is neither fanfiction nor a movie. As much as I wish it were, there is no version of this where I can say that everything is going to be alright. At least not for me.
    I’m not going to bore you with wistful memories of back then, or make you cringe as, “I saw them for the first time.” It wasn’t like that. They were just... there. Suddenly they were just there and was both everything I wanted and nothing I needed. I tried to deny it for many months. It was just a stupid crush right?

No, no, nothing is ever that simple, is it?

    Talking to friends about what to do only made it worse. It became painfully obvious that there was nothing to be done about it. I couldn’t suppress my feelings for them like I did everyone else. I had crushes, yeah and I joked around a lot about liking someone in the past. I even had a few unsuccessful relationships. But nothing really like this. I didn’t think much of it at first and truth be told, I really should have paid attention.
    As time went on and my condition worsened, I thought it best to talk to them and tell them how I felt. On my list of things I really wished I hadn’t done, this might have made number one.
    Silence.

    I had prepared for them to say anything, including the inevitable answer I was sure I’d get. Just my luck, I got the thing I was least prepared to deal with.. To say I took the incident hard is an understatement. I sat up at night wondering what exactly was wrong with me. I cried. A lot. The me now wonders why I let my self-worth be determined by someone else. I still don’t really know the answer to that.

    The months to follow weren’t quite as bad. I forgot about it in favor of other things, but the thought was still in the back of my mind. I had an occasional crisis but nothing too serious. I had come to the conclusion that I couldn’t please everyone. It was a bitter truth, but it was my truth so I allowed myself to carry on as I normally would. I thought I was finally okay.

    I thought.

    In an attempt to shake my perpetual sadness, a good friend of mine suggested an outing. I agreed happily, thinking that getting out of my house would be just the thing I needed. As you can probably guess, that was not so.

        There they were with their... partner. Right in front of me. Laughing and smiling, just as I remembered them. Like nothing was wrong.

    Happiness and content just were not in the cards for me that day. I couldn’t even make eye contact with them for about ten minutes. I wanted to crawl into the nearest dark corner and stay there. I wanted to seep into the floorboards and cease to exist. In short, I was less than okay for the better part of an afternoon.
    The feelings of inadequacy surged and I felt worse than I ever could have imagined. I disguised the hurt with jokes and playful banter. I had planned to confront them that day but when I finally worked up the nerve, the pair were hand in hand, effectively shutting me down in every sense of the word. I thought that when people said they felt empty, they were joking or being dramatic.

       They were not.

As the summer months came and went, it was once again that magical time of year where we are forced to sit in a government regulated institution for six to seven hours. I had expected when I saw them for the pain to still be there. As my luck would have it, the one time I was right, it had to be this one. You don’t quite know pain until you’ve seen someone you care about in someone else’s arms. Literally.

I began ignoring them. I figured I would test out that, “Out Of sight, out of mind,” saying that has been around forever. I love that that particular saying says nothing about your hearing. Their name was everywhere. I dreamt about them. It was if the universe was at war with my emotional stability and They were the propaganda.

It's almost been a year now.

And here I am. Alive, but not really. Happy, but not really. Just okay.

There is in fact, a lesson to be learned here, I’m not just talking here. Writing. Whatever. The thing is I figured exactly what loving someone means. It means putting someone’s well being before your own, even if it hurts. Basically it’s pain. A lot of unnecessary pain. And compromise. Would I say that it’s worth it? Yeah, a little bit. It may not seem like it, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is. What I’m getting at here is to expect the hurt. It’s all about perspective, honestly. It’s up to you to decide how you deal with it, because you are ultimately on your own the minute you admit you have feelings for someone.

As for me, the story isn't really over. Like I said, there was no happy ending for me here... You never truly move on from something or someone like that. The fall was easy enough, but the climb? It's never been steeper.

I’m not upset, though. Not even a little bit. And do you know why?

Because love means to me that I’ll be loyal no matter what. Come Hell or high water, I will be there. Although this may seem noble, or foolish, depending on who you are, I have a fear that I’ll eventually destroy myself with this way of thinking.

But that’s okay. I’m okay.

                                           END