Relationships are rough, especially relationships that contain a lot of firsts. First serious relationship, first real “date,” first time sleeping over with your partner, and everything in between. Those things mean a lot. Even if the relationship turns sour, or you realize that you don’t think it’ll work out, those things will stay in the back of your mind forever. You’ll remember the first time you went on a date with them longer than you’ll remember their smell. Eventually, the little details will fade away, and only the important things will stay in your memory… But right now, all of it is at the forefront of my mind. Not just our first kiss, our first date, and the first time that he slept over, but the way his hair felt, the way he mimicked the intro of the show we watched together, and even how he liked his rice cooked as well.
I’m not exactly sure when or how I realized I wasn’t happy in my relationship, but I did. I found myself getting annoyed at the smallest things, getting overly upset at simple misunderstandings, and getting relieved when I didn’t get a text back for a while. Those are just a few of the things that I dealt with. As I’m writing this it has only been a few hours since we broke up. It was civil, mature, and mutual. I was even the one who started it. But yet, my heart is completely in pieces. I had been set on ending it for a couple weeks, and I didn’t even think I had romantic feelings left for him, plus we had only been dating for two months.
But here I am, about to hit my sixth hour of crying.
Hour one I can’t even remember, but I’m sure it was just me sobbing into the nearest pillow. Hour two and three I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t sad. I facetimed my friend to talk about the breakup and ate some rice. Hour four I realized how much of my relationship with him we spent making or eating rice, and returned to the pit of sadness. Hour five I was numb. Kind of forgot that the breakup even happened to be honest. I fell into the never ending hole called TikTok and didn’t emerge until I got a text from a different friend, asking how I was holding up. Which leads me to the present. Hour six. I miss him, I regret it, I want him back… but I know that all of those things won’t last. I know it’s just the emotions talking, and in a few weeks I’ll be okay.
A week has passed and I feel like I have finally gotten off of the emotional rollercoaster. But here I am, rereading what I had written while caught up in my feelings a few hours after the breakup. I’m still sad, but I’m not crying anymore. I took the photo of us off the “polaroid wall” in my apartment, I took the clothes he gave me out of my closet, and I changed my lock screen. It sucked… but it helped. It’s been a week and I feel better than I thought I could have ever felt this soon after, but I do still think about him every day. Especially about all of those “firsts”. Even though I know now that I made the right decision for myself in the long run, it doesn’t take away from the fact that at the time I felt like…
I just broke my own heart.