It’s high school and you think you’ve met the person of your dreams, someone you cherish and give everything to, someone whose smile gives you life, someone who makes a day of pain go away with a single hug, someone whose attention is a drug that you are addicted to, someone you know you couldn’t live without, your first “I love you”. It’s perplexing how one person can make up such a enormous part of your life that you get so attached you become oblivious to all the flaws they carry with them, even if those play a role in making you feel worthless, unimportant, or the joke of the relationship. Yet, all you want is for them to be happy, so you put up with it, you put up with not being taken seriously, you put up with everything being how they want it, you put up with being unhappy. How could you not though? You do love them.

Unfortunately, people do get to experience the cold, lonely, nothingness of a relationship where you give it everything you got, literally everything, yet never receive anything in return. Your “significant other” the one who claims to have loved you, just takes and takes and takes, and is too busy in their own affairs they don’t think twice about whether you’re happy, or what they could do to better your day. But, you brush it off because as long as they’re happy, you’re happy right?

There is only so much emotional pain one can take, and when those feelings of being lesser, not as important, or irrelevant build up, you get to the point where you start to wonder about your future with this other person, if you really could be together forever or if you even want to be with them forever. Finally you hit a breaking point, finally you realize your addiction isn’t healthy. That the times of fighting, crying, sense of worthlessness, sorrow, depression, and love for them isn’t worth it. You can’t take being looked down on anymore, you can’t take coming in second all the time, you can’t take being taken advantage of, and not because you want to stop putting up with it, but because you can’t anymore. You’re physically and mentally exhausted and have broken down into tears one too many times. You look for the courage, the strength, and the desire to set your self free from the cynical abyss, you call a relationship, you’ve fallen into.

One day you wake up, knowing that today your world, your everything is going to be torn away from you. Thrown into the past as a distant memory, yet you’ll never let go, you’ll always hold onto something from that relationship. They will always be with you, you were molded by them, made to fit perfectly with them, apart of them in you never dies. The worst part is that you won’t stop loving them, you will always look for characteristics of them in someone else, you will try and replicate your love for them with someone else. You can’t, no one will ever be your first love again, no one  will ever be able to make you feel the amazing wonders of love like they did, and that’s just something that lingers in the back of your mind. Something that will haunt you for what seems like an eternity.

In the end though, you experience a sense of peace, a sense of freedom, you’re no longer subjected to the everlasting pain of being portrayed as worthless. Finally escaping the constant pressure of trying to be your best, trying to impress the one person that you want to impress, no more realization of  the hard truth: clearly they don’t appreciate you for who you are. They used you as if you were modeling clay to make you into this person that best interests them. It makes you develop insecurities, it makes you think you aren’t good enough to exceed their standards, that they don’t really love you, but rather the person they are trying to mold you into. Once you let go of that, the pain, the suffering, the emotions, you will achieve some sort of peace within yourself. Yet, from time to time, it’s not enough to just let go, you want to hold on, you can’t let go of the memories you had together, the fun times, the new experiences, you just can’t. You try to understand, but you can’t fathom how someone who was so perfect, wasn’t perfect after all.