Some said we were too young to be in love, and they were right. Not too young to understand the feeling, but too young to feel the emotions and the pain that more than likely came at the end of it. Too young to deal with the damage of a broken heart. The kind of love that you don’t know exists until you’re in it. You always fall for the ones you never expect, and that’s exactly what happened. He was an older boy, a track star, with dreamy eyes. He was one of the boys who you and your friends would look at and drool over. Well, I started running track that year and we flirted like crazy. I always felt like it was a joke to him because I thought there was no chance of him ever actually liking me, but he did. 

The next four months were a dream. I was in love, and I couldn’t even remember what my life was like before he was in it. We were just starting to build a relationship that I was convinced was going to last forever. We talked about college and life together. Which, looking back at, is so silly and unrealistic, but at the time, I believed it all. It wasn’t often that our families saw each other, but when they did, it was always a good time. This time, it was a Sunday, he was at the bowling alley with some people from church and his family. My dad and I decided to join them. This was the first time our dads had ever met. They talked and talked while competing to knock the most pins down. There were about 2 rounds left when Pastor, his father, came up to me and whispered in my ear “I hope you marry my son”. He told his son this too. We talked about it, and it made me so happy. This was the love of my life. So I thought. 

I was really into the country artist Luke Bryan, so my mom bought me front row tickets for my birthday that year. We planned it three months ahead so I had some very built up excitement. The Saturday night comes and I was so ready for my life to be changed by this concert. This was supposed to be the best night of my life. I looked down at my phone after a few songs and see “4 messages from My ❤️”. I thought I was just gonna hear about what he had for dinner or some question about the concert. Little did I know, It was the end. The end of something I thought would never end. He decided out of the blue that he couldn’t be with me anymore because “he was dealing with too much”. There was no service in the stadium, so for the rest of the night, I just stared at the messages. I tried so hard to enjoy the concert and not think about it but it seemed impossible. That was supposed to be the best night of my life but it was ruined. 

Monday comes around and it’s time for school. I was a wreck, I begged my mom to let me stay home but she was persistently telling me that I shouldn’t let some boy interfere with my education. She was right, but not to me at that moment. Every time I saw him that day, heard his name, or saw something that reminded me of him, my heart would sink and shatter into smaller, and smaller pieces. We had the last class of the day together, I had been mentally preparing myself to see him for the entire day but there was nothing I could do to prepare myself to see him. The second I heard his voice, it felt like my entire body dropped inside of me, it felt like I had just shrank 3 feet. I walked into the classroom, holding back thousands of tears that were begging to come out. I glared at him and immediately noticed a necklace around his neck. It was foreign to me, so I asked what it was. He said “It’s somebody that died”. I knew nobody died. He was hiding something, I could see it when I looked into his eyes. It was like he forgot that I could read his mind. He treated me like a stranger. I let it go. Until the next day, when I saw him posting with a new girl. I still hadn’t processed the fact that me and him weren’t together anymore, but he was with somebody new? “Already?” I thought. I was devastated, confused, and in utter shock. Can you fall out of love that fast? How could he do that to me? Has he been talking to her this whole time? These questions and thousands of others swarmed my mind for the next few months. 

People warned me. They told me he played girls, cheated on them, and didn’t care. But, I never listened. I was too blinded by the love I was experiencing to believe anything besides his words. Which is why every untold secret that I heard about him just broke me even more. I thought I knew him inside and out, turns out I knew the artificial version that he wanted me to know. 

After 5 months, I could listen to songs again that we used to listen to, I could go on his social media without breaking down, and I could talk about him without getting sad. Throughout those 5 months, I became a new person. I learned more about myself than I ever had. I discovered that my passion in life is fashion and I was able to start taking action on that. I learned who my true friends were and who they weren’t. I discovered what I was interested in, what I wanted in life, and what I didn’t want. I also learned not to trust so easily. Though it was one of the toughest things I’ve been through, it was also one of the biggest learning experiences.