To The Person Who Broke My Heart First

The book has been closed for a year but the chapters and ripped pages still haunt me. There were certain scenarios of you walking beside me clothed in white shirt, hair cleanly cut, facing towards north (towards my home) as you nonchalantly stare at where we were heading; I took a photograph of that moment in my memory; filtered with warm sunlight drifting away from the side of your face as the gentle tones of orange and purple combined on the surface of your skin.

Even when I am inside my dark room, or when the sun is already gone; that moment forever remained; locked in my memory. Things remind me of you.

The trees that hide me from extreme heat brought me back to that time where we climbed a tree and randomly carved our names with cliche ‘I love yous’ inside a heart. I remember the creaky stairs where you once caressed and carefully carried me to prevent your parents from waking up in the middle of the night. You lit a match inside me. It burns and hurts but it was a bearable pain.

There were places where we used to lay our eyes on, such beautiful sceneries and breathtaking views we have seen together. The conversations that we’ve had and fights that I still and couldn’t remember. Like movies, there’s a beginning, middle and an end. We must pass the struggle first before landing to heaven. There were acts of intoxication, our study tables that turned into bars filled with vodka shots amounting to nothing.

Nothing. Just adding headaches to our heartbreak due to hangovers. We did things to soothe and lessen the echo of the past we have created. We desired to enter the ‘commitment club’. That every time we tried and risked, it was always the wrong person that comes out. A man flirting with me still does not have that same effect as you. A girl that you liked so much that you tried to lower the walls and weight in your back and took a chance with her, but it leaves an unfamiliar space inside of you that you cannot seem to fill.

We both suffered like a handicapped and disabled being. I know you want to be found and I am just as lost.

You will see the woman of your dreams, that woman you have thought of since you were a child and we will meet ours in time and it will replace everything that has hurt us. It is alright… that you don’t miss me, look for me or that you no longer wait. Maybe we weren’t meant to live together. Maybe you were meant for something which I am not a part of or a life where ‘I’ does not exist.

I never wanted to hide behind that bathroom when you heard your mother approaching with your little sister, and I should have declined that call coming from her when she discovered that we were secretly together. We were blessed with so much hate that the struggles we overcame, the problems we’ve encountered and exchange of silences, the spontaneous weeks of sinful actions we had separately committed, the selfish arguments and trials along the way, and promise of a world where it was just us against the earth.

All of these were worth it and I am grateful that you became a part of it as I have become a part of yours.

After a year of absence in each other’s life, it still leaves me with ‘an unprepared life to start anew with another human being’. I think I am not ready for that yet, maybe when I get wiser and stronger and when the timing is right I will find that. I could not look at the world without thinking that I have felt everything and that I could not spare a piece of my life with another boy sharing that kind of mutual intensity of togetherness.

I know it’s not yet time because your face still appears in my head.

I have sworn to myself that I will start with a blank memory and fill those with my future self with that future person. I never thought marriage would be a part of my dream and I never thought of kids but now I think I do. And I know you do too. All the plans that we have made together, series of imaginations we have woven for years such as a night after the wedding in Santorini then to taking a vacation in Maldives and getting lost in Paris; it will all soon be replaced with another place and plans made with another person and as much as we want to have it together, our intertwined fate have already disentangled.

It was like our feet have gone cold that we couldn’t seem to reach one another. You are from a different side and I’m in a strange place.

Relationship in a complicated world revolves around a universal experience of pain and pleasure. The planets eventually die, the stars burst and vanish like the effect of a heartbreak narrated by your voice that rings in my ear, or the language that we speak that people cannot seem to comprehend; to the newly discovered earth in mars or Kepler and back, all of those cheesy things and all the disgusting stuff we did together in bed were something I could not feel again.

It was eternally different with you. You are my greatest love. The year has ended and we need some growing up to do yet I know that we matured in special ways apart. Seems to me like I am watching you from a faraway and distant universe filled with planets that block us, the perpetual space that separates us, the countless and ad infinitum stars distracting us yet there you are, breathing and living and here I am experiencing the same thing… only apart. May you live well and love better.