October 27, 2021

To the first boy, I ever loved,

When you first wanted me, I wrote: 

4/21/19

“I am not sure of anything other than I want to feel this way forever.”

When you stopped wanting me (the first time), I wrote a lot of melodramatic poetry about you. It wasn’t all that bad, but I talked too hopefully about places you only took me once, and I made up a lot of stuff about you.

In all the in-between, I wrote:

8/2/20

“I can’t find where it still hurts. I waste time, I’m still wasting time for you. To have you would be enough, and I would never ask for anything again.”

When you wanted me again, I wrote all the time. I couldn’t get thoughts out fast enough, but even when I could, I never found the right words. You found your way into everything I wrote: journal entries, class assignments, song lyrics, poems, doodles. I wrote that you were perfect, and I had never felt so happy in my life or I wrote that you were chipping away pieces of me, slowly, wax dripping from a candle. And I believed that both could be true. 

Today, I write:

I used to believe I was being punished, served some sort of strange karma in the form of a boy who told me that loving me meant telling me every way that he wished I was different and every way that I could never measure up. I believed I could pay in terms of hurt; I could win you if I hurt the right amount. 

You didn’t like it when I acted like a real person, so I molded myself to become a reflection of you. I existed only how you decided to feel about me every moment. And I held my breath in every moment because your interest in me never lasted longer than that.

I’m still young, so I hope you can forgive me for getting swept up in the game of being enough for you. You’re still young too, so I forgive you for being reckless with the people in your life.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love you. I don’t think that I will ever stop loving you, but for the first time since I met you, I know that I want more for myself beyond existing between the walls of yours or not-yours. 

So I’ve done my crying, and I’ve done my social media stalking, and I’ve done my texting you when I shouldn’t, and I choose now to have some perspective. You are not the only person I will ever be in love with, no matter how often it feels that way. You are not the final word on what I deserve, despite the years we spent pretending that you were. I was whole and complete before I met you, just as I am now, and just as I will be the next time I love someone the way I love you.

Yours,

CG

P.S. You have a say in the people you allow to take space in your heart. Your “loss” has only created more space for yourself. Take it.