DATE STARTED: NOVEMBER 26, 2015
DATE FINISHED: NOVEMBER 26, 2015
DATE EDITED: PENDING
WORD COUNT: 1718

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I saw him again.

I was walking out of the university to go grab a macchiato and review my Poli Sci notes, and he was walking in, late for his class and his earphones blocking out the world. I don’t think he saw me. I wish he did. I miss him. He was carrying his big, heavy books and his pride well. His arms made me do a double-take. I wished his arm was slung over my shoulder, not my backpack.

My heart begs for him back. He hurt me, of course he did. I know that. But he also loved me and he admitted to his fault and let me go, even if it hurt him and in turn, hurt me even more.

I stared at him for as long as I could without tripping on my heels and went my way, deciding to go straight home instead and be alone for a while. I didn’t expect to see him and now that I have, all my feelings just instantly came back and it’s like a whirlwind of emotions I wish would go away.

As my macchiato was being made, I stared into space, mindlessly playing a stupid game on my phone and thinking about him, about how it turned sour, about how all I want is him being mine again.

I bite my lip constantly when I’m about to say or do something bad and right now, I wanted to run back to the uni and hug him and ask him if he still loved me. Normally, I could constrain myself from doing the stupid things my emotions compel me to do but this, this is different. I’m actually on the edge of my seat, constantly lifting my butt from the seat and then pulling my body back down into the chair.

“One Caramel Macchiato for Kain?” The barista yelled out into the room of college students in their own worlds.

When I stood up, I noticed that I was the only person in the café sitting alone. Everyone was with someone and it hurt. With all my willpower, I bit back tears, took my drink and walked out of the store, dignity still intact, for now.

It was a fifteen-minute ride to my house on public transportation that I had spent staring into space, my mind going to my one happy place left. A world where we were still together and laughing, and talking, and together. Before him, I had so many worlds in my mind with so many different scenarios that I knew could make me happy but after him, all of those worlds disappeared into the back of my mind and I created a new one. With just him and me, and it was the only place I felt safe. It’s the only home I have left.

No one was home when I got there, which was a good thing. I locked the gate and then the door and changed out of my school clothes and into my comfiest shorts and shirt. And then I finished my macchiato and settled on sitting on my bed to think.

I was a freshmen taking Political Science and I was alone. I didn’t like any of my classmates and the ones I did like were still not necessarily considered friends. Nav was the only person I liked in school and the only person I considered a friend in school and he was boyfriend. Now that we’ve broken up, I have no one. And it hurts.

I’m the kind of person that knows what she has and chooses to see things in third person as much as she can so she could understand why things happen and when he broke up with me, I just didn’t see the logic. It was the stupidest thing I had ever seen a guy do.

Not only did he hurt me with what he did before but he also hurt me by breaking up with me and I don’t have a lot of words for how I feel about it. Sometimes, I think it’s all a dream and I’m going to wake up at some point with a text message from him saying, “Good morning, I love you.”

I’ve tried preserving all of my memories with him. Looking them inside my head and keeping them away from everyone’s harsh eyes so they stay clean.

Everyone says it’s stupid that I’m still not over him. Everyone. They keep telling me that he was ugly, that he was a douchebag, that he really didn’t deserve me. That I could do better than him. Infinitely better and it hurts me every time people say things like that because despite the fact that those things may be true, they don’t know me as much as I know myself and I know that I love him and that I want him back. He’s the only person I want to talk to these days and he’s the only person I can’t talk to.

All of the times I told people that he broke up with me, everyone asked me if they could beat him up and they said all of these horrible racial slurs that targeted his skin color and every word felt like it was directed at me. I appreciated their efforts to make me smile but I just madder and madder every time.

Who are you to tell me that he’s black and can’t match up with my skin tone? Who are you to tell me that I could easily be dating a handsome Asian rather than being hung over a guy that couldn’t even make a girl swoon? You don’t know how my mind works! You don’t know me! You can’t tell me all of these things because you aren’t me. You aren’t going through this, I am!

Tears sprung from my eyes as I thought of these things.               Simply, I missed him and it was going to take a long time for me to stop missing him.

The entire ordeal sent me back to eight years ago when I was nine. And I was normal, I was okay but then, my parents separated and I stopped functioning. It took so long for me to accept it and it took seeing my mother pregnant with another man’s child and my father having a girlfriend for me to do so. I thought about how stupid it was for them to make that decision knowing that they had a child. I knew that they wanted to be happy but they also had to remember that they had a responsibility to take care of.

I hated them for forgetting about me. For thinking that I wasn’t a priority anymore. I knew they loved me but I hated them so much because of what they did to me. That’s the thing with humans. They worry about hurting other people with their decisions but never really think about the feelings of the persons who are affected by their decisions. Nav was like that too.

He broke up with me because he acknowledged the sadness I was feeling because of him and decided that for me to be happy, he had to disappear from my life without a trace, and didn’t think twice about how it would’ve impacted me.

He said he wouldn’t leave me. He said he loved me and I wanted to believe that and I still do but I just couldn’t. Because if he did, he would have fixed the situation, he wouldn’t have just upped and left like my parents.

But even after overanalyzing his stupid decision, I still wanted him. I still needed him.

He made me feel loved for the first time in years. Not loved like a girlfriend but loved like a person who mattered. I hadn’t felt that since I was a child and it felt so nice and he had to take that away. And I would have preferred that he never made me feel like that in the first place if he was just going to pull back after I had drowned in it.

His love was like the sea, calm under the sun and violent during the rain, but even then, you’re still assured to wash up on shore if you got caught under bad weather. And now it feels like I’m drifting aimlessly in the ocean, where I know I no one is going to be able to come rescue me.

I shook my head and stood up. I walked around the house, jumping and mumbling to myself, letting my tears drop onto the cement, imagining it was blood and that by the end of everything, I’d have nothing left inside of me.

The days following our breakup, I was begging and praying for something to happen to me so I could forget him and forget my emotions. I wanted to forget because it felt cruel to be left like this.

I kept passing by the mirror and I avoided looking at it. I knew that I was a mess. A pretty mess that had a nose as red as Rudolph’s. I could imagine him now, smiling with his friends and I could imagine how I’d be at the back of his mind, maybe the butt of a couple of relationship jokes and I just wished I could do something.

Everyone says I’m strong, that I’m going to get through this and I’ve had them believe that I was on the road to forgetting about him but I can’t. I can’t forget about him because I still think about how something, anything, can bring us together to at least talk things through.

I’ve fooled everyone too well. No one could probably guess that I was at home, crying and walking around like a dolt. They’d never understand. They weren’t me. And even if that makes me feel like the loneliest person in the world, that’s okay, because that means he won’t be the butt of any jokes my friends are probably making right now.

When my feet got tired, I took one last walk to the fridge, took a long swig of Coke Zero straight from the bottle, and padded back to my bed, landing on it with a thud and then grabbing my laptop and started typing.