Where do you go when home no longer feels like home? When everything you have ever been sure about falls apart and leaves nothing salvageable? What do you do when you are surrounded by people but you can’t help but feel alone? Your friends cannot seem to make you happy anymore. Your mom becomes distant because everytime she asks you what is wrong all you can say is, “I’m fine, just tired...” when she knows all you do is sleep. I have been in this place and I have felt the pain it seems to produce in abundance. My fists can tell you how hard the walls are. The pillows can tell you how many screams they have heard and tears they have felt. You’re too young to be this sad. It’s just a broken heart, honey, it will be okay. You don’t even know what real love is yet. My love came early and without warning. It left in the same fashion.

The story is simple. I meet a boy, we date, then we break up. It is nothing more dramatic than the classic teenage love story or one of those famous romantic comedies. My happy ending, however, didn’t make the cut when they rewrote the script. My life has never felt so real, raw, and undeniably different. Love has a funny way of working its way inside you, to your core, and making you see the world through a lens of misapprehension. This world you see is beautiful; full of life, love, and happiness with enough for everyone to have seconds. Then, as fast as this world caught your attention and pulled you into its foreseeable yet invisible doom, it crashes and burns and leaves you with only your beating heart and nothing to step into rhythm with it. I lost myself in the beauty of this exact place and it only got worse as our love grew and my sense of reality lessened.

He left me for all the right reasons and the right reasons are the most painful. We both had to grow and at first our seeds were planted side by side. Our roots were intertwined for the time of which we both agreed to work together and take on this journey hand in hand. He then started to get more sunlight, more water, and he felt like he had no choice but to leave me behind in the darkness. I dying of thirst. I was growing attached to him but he felt compelled to pull away. He only let me in when alcohol was running through his bloodstream and I was the first person he knew to call that would answer right away. Without knowing it, he gave me the job of cutting the strings but I didn’t know how to find the scissors. I had no desire to find them anyway as I answered those calls and fell for that drunken love I so desperately desired.

There comes a point where you hit rock bottom and the only direction left to go is back up. The only problem is that the journey back up isn’t as easy as it is coming down. I have found those scissors yet cutting these strings isn’t easy when they are made out of fear, regret, and hope. I have learned that I can only cut one string at a time and to take my time cutting it. What we had was pure. It was the kind of love that some people spend a lifetime looking for. I can only cling to the hope that it was taken away for the right reasons. I have to learn how to love again, only this time I have to love myself. I have to reconnect with the people I pushed away as I was running into his arms and into this other world. My heart has been torn off of my sleeve and I must sew it back on. One stitch at a time.