Mind At Night

My Dear Melancholy

I had written a whole bunch of stories in a journal that I am now going to transfer into digital form for your reading enjoyment. This first story is completely fictional and any similarities to real life are purely coincidental. All quotations courtesy of the book "Love Her Wild" by the poet Atticus.

"The beautiful thing about young love is the truth in our hearts that it will last forever." The infamous first love hurt just as much as everyone expects. When you lose them, you don't know how to go on living normally without them. You spend whole days laying in bed trying to understand why you weren't good enough, why one person could so quickly become all you think about then take the air right out of your lungs. The feeling they gave you will forever stay in your memory, the feeling of being invincible, of being loved and wanted for once. Endless questions haunting you; why did they leave you, did they ever love you, and did you love them or did you love the thought of them.

"Love is throwing yourself into a stormy sea hoping there are arms to catch you knowing that without the leap there is only the safe and lonely shore." It resembled the first snow in the winter season, I fell quick and harder as time went on. And it all started with prom. Every teenager at this time was frantically searching for a prom date and I thought I had found one. In all of my childhood memories there seemed to be a common thread. A carefree, reckless and charming blonde headed boy brought me the greatest memories to ever live in my head. Whether it was late night baseball games, egging houses or just hanging out in my bright pink bedroom, he was there to entertain and care for me. That brown eyed immature young kid and I hadn't spoken in years but he was the kind of guy to drop everything if you needed him so I had known he would go if I wanted him to. And as the time to prom counted down, he awoke the childlike spirit and the butterflies within me. He was still the familiar charming boy I remembered.

"Love could be labeled poison and we'd drink it anyways." How else does a love begin in the digital age but with daily good morning/good night snapchats and hiding your phone during the day just to speak to each other? With some much time lost over those years, we had a lot to catch up on. We spent whole nights laughing together, crying together, sharing their fears, sharing how much we had grown since those little childhood best friends. He had just been given life altering news, and I tried to distract him from that terrible situation with offering to take him to an upcoming party. The party itself was not exciting but offered slight development in the little relationship I had been praying for. Because of that party, a conversation ensued that proved further just how far I'd fallen. Fr then on, I gave up my addicting party lifestyle for him as he showered me with cheesy lovable comments, getting me addicted to love instead.

"When I saw you first, it took every ounce of me not to kiss you. When I saw you laugh, it took every ounce of me not to love you. And when I saw your soul, it took every ounce of me." Over the course of the next few weeks, things only got better. He had secretly messaged our mutual best friends asking for advice about his feelings. They had saved the messages to send me and to this day, I still read them to take me back to a happier time. He had asked the pair why I wanted to be with him, what I would want in a relationship, and expressing his feelings for me to them since he was too shy to express them out loud.

"It's a lonely thing, protecting a breakable heart." With every person you care about, loving them means also loving their baggage and taking on their hardships as your own. That life altering news would continue to haunt him with the uncertainties of the future. How could he be worried with trivial teenage drama when the death of a loved one loomed over his head? I knew all of this, I knew what the boy was going through and how that may affect our relationship but I was naive and was blind to the warnings of others and let myself fall in love with the boy.

"It's not the fear of losing them that scares us, it's that we have given them so many of our pieces that we fear losing ourselves when they are gone. He was the most beautiful complicated thing I'd ever seen-- a tangled mess of silky string-- and all I wanted of life was to sit down cross-legged and untie the knots." Our time together was the happiest I had ever been. The movie nights spent cuddling and holding hands, hanging out with our friends into the early hours of morning and of course prom spent dancing in each other's arms singing along to terrible country love songs. Fast forward through the nights full of cute gestures and endless smiles. It came down to endless tears and the world crashing around me. I knew he was emotionally unstable with his current situation, I knew he wanted what was best for me and he thought he would end up hurting me worse if he pulled me into his situation, I knew it was my fault for falling for him, but all that mattered to me now was the sharp stabbing pain where my heart was supposed to be.

"I have seen your darkest nights and brightest days and I want you to know that I will be here forever loving you in dusk. From the moment I saw him I knew this one was worth the broken heart." My friends tried to save me from the dark hole I fell into. Hanging on by a tiny thread I understood what Alice must have felt when she fell down that rabbit hole, not knowing if what was at the bottom would save her. Sympathetic messages from the boy's best friend saying, "He didn't want to pull you through his mess of a life," and "You're stronger than this. You don't need this in your life. You're smart, strong, beautiful and he doesn't deserve you." He goes on telling me that the boy is only pushing me away with mean words to make it easier for me to stay away from his toxic unstable life.

"In all the wild world, there is no more desperate creature than a human being on the verge of losing love. As he took her hand he gave her all she had been waiting for-- a shiver down her spine." I loved him for reasons that don't make sense to me even now. For seeing me as beautiful without the need to wear makeup or while wearing ridiculously nerdy glasses. For being sweet and caring and giving any excuse just to talk to me, even at three in the morning after baseball practice with sleep in his eyes, he chose me. For making me laugh and genuinely making me happier than I had ever been in my entire life. I loved him because he liked me for me, nobody had ever made me feel this wanted and loved. In the end, I will never know if his friend was right, if he had been doing this to protect me or if he really had just been leading me on not noticing I had fallen in love. I will never know what would have been. All I know for sure, is that you will never forget your first love. "We drowned out the voices in our hearts that our love had run its course, for this night at least the old music played louder than the truth that beat beneath our shirts, and as the stars melted into morning we smiled at the old stories and left our love hanging in the air as we embarked alone on our tomorrows."