On Break Ups

I don't really beleive that there is one, love-above-all, soulmate. There is, perhaps, the greatest love you will ever feel for another person. The best connection.

All I know is now. I have no comparison. Is this why high school crushes feel like the end of the world? It's the first romantic love, and so the only. Who's to know if you'll ever begin to love someone else the way you loved your high school boyfriend?

It's like giving away a peice of yourself. It's like... there's this piece of yourself, and...it's gone. You don't know how, or why. You just know.

You never imagine the end of a relationship while you're in one. When you tell someone your secrets, you don't realize that that means they're not yours anymore. You're trusting that person with your heart, but when you care about them, when you like them, it's implicit. It's not a carefully reasoned, carefully measured choice. You don't decide to trust them. You just do.

And then when they leave you, it's the absence of someone to share your life with. You're bereft of their constant presence by your side. They're just...not there anymore.

All of a sudden, every experience you've ever had together is just a reminder of that. He's the one who took you to a concert and gave you his sweatshirt when it got cold.

It's easier to make things abstract. To not get into the specifics.

You want to make the relationship everything, because then, somehow, you'll be able to make sense of why it hurts so much. There's a connection between you, warm and most definitely real, and you pour trust and love and secrets into it until there's nothing left that's not yours.

It's a joint account.
You've opened it together, and, even if you close it together, the reclaiming of what's yours isn't easy. How do you tell?

Because you won't be able to go back to how you were before. He's a part of you now, too. After you have a connection with someone, something in your life will be missing.

Slowly, slowly, you can rediscover who you were before him. With the help of freinds, reminding yourself of your life, what's valuable in it. What you care about that's not him. Many, many things. The longer the relationship, the more you have to rediscover. The more you have to relearn. The farther back you have to go--the harder it is to find out what it was before him.

And the more you care about someone, the harder it is.

The more you feel like you've lost.