The songs which I used to listen to during secondary school now haunt me. “When I’m With You” has become synonymous to the last time I felt us coming together in a kaleidoscope of mixed anticipation and desire to have what we could only keep for a brief moment. “Breakeven” now finds me in my own bed, alone, at three A.M. - and it doesn’t feel like “three in the morning” anymore. It simply feels awfully like my heart being pressed slowly and painfully by a hundred pound iron. The end of November, with the imminence of final examinations and going out with friends thereafter, feels more like a death sentence as the year begins to fade. I haven’t felt genuinely happy since the last day of my summer break and I feel as if my world has collapsed, only to be barely saved by Atlas. My friend talks to me of cuddling and my mind travels back to the time when your car was the most warming place I’d ever been in - before then, I correlated cars to being enclosed, to being trapped, but now I see a similar car to yours on the road and all I can do is try not to cry and scream uncontrollably. That one time after I saw you, the morning after, at seven in the morning, I couldn’t take it anymore and I cried on the bus. No one told me that one love, one hold of a hand, one kiss, one mistake, would mar me for the rest of my goddamned life. Two other people have kissed me but I was so afraid and ashamed. I guess they cared, but I could not reciprocate their dreams unto them. I did not feel guilty that I chose you over him. You did the same with her over me. I lost both of you. The choices I’ve made this summer will follow me forever. They are reminders of how much I fucked up. I chose temporary happiness over a legitimized future. I am surrounded by friends who I can count on now, yet I feel so alone. 現在我很心痛。 I don’t know where or how to go on from here. I want closure - being back in your arms one last time - simple, innocent, pure.
You text me right now and ask: “So you feeling any better?” I know you are asking me about my cold. It will go away, but the sickness in my heart will not. I am sorry for fucking everything up and I’m here to apologize for everything. If I didn’t choose to stay, I wouldn’t have met you. If I didn’t stop chasing my dreams, there may have been a chance I would have ended up with you. If there was a parallel universe, in another lifetime, if we were so fucking close and almost made it in this one, we would have been together in that one. I didn't know I could love someone so deeply until I met you. I already know how the day that kills me will go: you message me and tell me you are to be married and all I can do is smile and congratulate you, but inside I will be dead. I am always going forward and working on myself - school, work, and friends - but now I have been finding that I’m breaking down out of nowhere and I’ve been relapsing. I’m scared and I’m so afraid that I really don’t mean much to you anymore - or worse, that I was nothing to you to begin with. I already know that when I connect with another soul and I look into his eyes, I will be haunted by the ghosts of the past - you offered me your jacket when I was cold, you told me not to cut, you told me how I was always grateful for everything, you kissed me and I was finally exalted, and when I met you, I didn’t believe I could ever feel so at home. When the familiar becomes heartbreaking, is it then the time for me to go? Someone asked me out, but I refused. I panicked and like lightning, memories flashed before my eyes. Before I would have been so happy, but now I have to refuse his offer. I cannot love someone again like how I loved you - every person is different, every experience yields different processes and outcomes, but I’m so afraid of falling and failing yet again. Is this how love ends? Oh, it never does. You told me to be softer, but I vowed never to change myself for others, yet I unconsciously found myself wearing makeup, wearing leggings and skirts, and talking in a gentler voice. Sometimes I find myself wanting pre-April me back - I wanted to be fearless again, stronger, louder, even more boisterous, and more unfazed by love. I cannot tell you any of this. I cannot tell you how you lit my world on fire then doused it out. I cannot tell you how broken I am. I cannot tell you that while I am still going with my life, I still think of what has happened. It begins to feel more detached, as if this has happened to another person, but one word or action from a friend sends me into the ghosts of your arms. You moved on so easily - how do I leave a part of myself behind? Real changes under false pretenses are the most painful. I cannot go back. When it is four A.M. and I should be asleep, nostalgia whispers to my heart to come back. I wake up at six A.M. and I feel like I have not slept all of my life and I have felt all the pain in the world. I’ve lost weight and I’m losing my old self. It is true: there is one love that we cannot have and oh, it will follow us. When someone else says they love us and think they can gaze into our hearts and souls, we are carried by the wind, back before April showers held promise of bringing flowers in May. We think of the one we love so dearly, and it is not the person who proclaims forever with us. It is not the person who stands before us. It is the person who built castles with us. It is the person who gave us what we needed most at a certain time. It is the person who not only kissed our lips and cuddled us as the world began only to encompass the two of us, but the one who saw into our soul and stayed. It is the person we will always love even when the bridge has burned and I am staring from our old side as you walk on, the silhouette of your back the only thing I can touch with the longing in my eyes. It is the person who is long gone from our lives and has moved on while we continue to love them unconditionally. It is our one first true love. For me, it is you.
