As I sit here in my dorm, crying and listening to depressing music, I can’t help but realize it’s my own fault. Have you ever had someone you just couldn’t let go of? That one person you’d do anything to have back? Well I’ve had my fair share of those, but this particular person was unlike any other. I’d been through my fair share of falling in love and later bad breakups, but nothing could have prepared me for what I would get myself into this time.
I’m a big believer in wishing. I wish on everything. See a rainbow? Make a wish. See a butterfly? Make a wish. Shooting stars? Oh, don’t even get me started! I have special necklaces I wear and I thoroughly believe they make my wishes come true. So it’s no surprise that every day at 11:11, I make a wish.
Before I met him every wish was to find my “prince charming.” I love being in love. I’ll never forget that day I saw him, honestly I thought he was the cockiest person I’d ever met. Later he’d turn out to be my prince charming, or so I thought. Once we realized we wanted to be together, everything moved so fast. We spent every day together, and he was everything I had wished for… literally.
In August, we both headed off to college. We were four hours away from each other, and I wasn’t sure how we would both take the distance. We both went home almost every weekend to see each other, and sometimes I’d drive the four hours to hang out with him on the weekends. I was selling clothes just to have gas money to make the trip there.
After Christmas, things started falling apart. In February he asked me for $200 to pay his rent. He promised he’d pay me back, but I wasn’t worried … I was his girlfriend. I was supposed to do nice things like that right? Wrong.
On Valentine’s Day, yes the most romantic day of the year, he broke up with me… over the phone… after I had just scrounged up $100 for gas to go to his apartment for the weekend.
I couldn’t imagine what I had done wrong. I cried … a lot. I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t go to class. As far as I was concerned my life was over.
And then one day I realized that I’d “bribe” him to be with me. I bought him the shoes he’d been drooling over at the mall, and the Dr. Dre headphones he wanted. Later he asked me for $46,000 to buy a new truck. I knew I could never give him that much money without my parents knowing, so I had to say no. He found a new truck he wanted, and said he only needed $500 from me. I had been saving up to buy a new purse, and giving him that money almost killed me. A week later, he wanted $700 more. I stole $300 from my mom when she came to visit me at school, but I didn’t know where I was going to get the rest. He promised me if I gave him all this stuff and money, we could get back together in the summer. We had also talked about me paying for him and his friends to go to Las Vegas for his twenty-first birthday in August.
In my head I knew he was using me, but I also knew I wanted him more than anything. After everything I did for him, he told me he needed his space from me and he wanted me to stop texting and calling him. He said if I didn’t we’d never get back together, and I shouldn’t expect him to give me any of the money back.
I felt like someone punched me in the stomach, but it was in that moment I realized that he never really wanted me; he wanted what I had. It was in that moment that I realized that my “prince charming” wouldn’t treat me like that. It was also in that moment that I realized sometimes we have to forget what we want, and remember what we deserve.
So as I sit here wondering what my next step is, I’m choosing to not be sad about the things I lost, but to be happy about what I’ve found … me.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at IU chapter.