Tattered Paper Heart

Introduction.

Where i'm from, most people find love when they're young.

They'll find it at highschool, or in their childhood best friend. The geeky, awkward boy your parents forced you to hang out with when you were five, and suddenly at sixteen you see him in a different light. Or when you're at the legal age you'll find a guy you want to kiss in the darkened corner of a dingy bar and two years later he's your husband and you're expecting your first child.

This is not me.

From the age of fourteen I began dating. I was young, and experiencing puppy love. As i progressed, i became smarter, could read the signs better, began to experience what it was like to get my heart shattered, and along with that my confidence and self esteem. I know what it feels like to have a man rip your heart from your chest and squish it right in front of you. I know what it's like to be met with silence when all you want is for that special someone to contact you, to spend days and days analysing every single detail of your last encounter with said escape artist and wonder where you went wrong. I've dated guys from the unbelievably manipulative, arrogant, pig-headed mysogenist to the sweetheart best friend who you really, really wished you could fall in love with because it would make your life so much easier, and then everything in between.

And still, despite this, i continue to wear my heart on my sleeve and attempt to open the frail, tattered pieces of my heart, in the hope that someday one of the men i come across will take the broken pieces in his hands and gently try to put them back together for me. Deep down, i still have faith, even though sometimes i might get drunk and swear off the male species for life. I drive my friends crazy with my stories, my frustration, and tales of men from the past who have attempted to emotionally cripple me. I spin circumstances around in my head, STILL attempting to psychoanalyse situations when I can't seem to acknowledge that he just doesn't like me romantically - because of course there must have been something i did or said that caused him to not be interested - and i still go back to past experiences that i wish i could just live within forever.

So, to get the experiences out of my consciousness and into the universe so they don't drive me insane, i've decided to catalogue the most memorable of these snapshots in time. Hopefully they're entertaining - it would be nice to know that while i'm sorting through the mess inside my head there are some people getting a kick out of reading about my most crappy and rewarding circumstances. I won't be using names for obvious reasons, but i will be nick-naming each individual.

Well, here goes... i guess the best way is to start from the very beginning.