How To Ruin Your Future By Romanticizing Your Past

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You start innocently looking back at old photos, laughing at your haircut and outfit choices, and then you stop cold at a photo of yourself looking into the eyes of the guy that broke your heart. It takes everything you have to choke back the tears from the flood of memories you thought you overcame long ago. This cheesy, cliche photo triggers an avalanche of emotion and a barrage of images that make the distant past seem as though it were only yesterday.

Someone must have placed some trendy rose tinted Ray-Ban’s over your eyes as sugarcoated memories flash through your mind.

Life was easier then.

Happier.

You were in love and you truly believed that nothing could take that feeling away. You held on to the promises he made and the life you believed would be spent together. You laughed with your entire being and loved with the naiveté of a child, and for those few minutes stuck in rosy purgatory all you remember are the times he bought you flowers and brought you soup when you were sick.

So much time has passed, but you can’t help but wonder what would have happened if those two strangers staring at each other had stayed in love.

And then you take off those fingerprint-smudged glasses and are reminded of the reality.

The reality is that you spent every day waiting for the end; for him to change his mind and walk away. You think about the days when you dreaded seeing him because you knew he would be in a bad mood and pick a fight or the indescribable pain you felt when he said he didn’t love you anymore.

It is far too easy to look back on the past with rose-colored glasses distorting your memories.

The past gets marled, a haze settles over the fine details and you are forced to remember only the love and happiness you felt, but don’t let that seemingly transparent blockade fool you.

With clear eyes you look back at those feelings of utter bliss and realize it wasn’t that simple, for if it was, and you really were as happy as those pictures would make it seem, he never would have left.