Monday (Repaired)

We broke up on a Monday.

He said things weren’t same, that they haven’t been the same for a while. I guess I felt it too, but in a different way.

Two months later and I still don’t know how one night could have changed it all for him. After thinking, in hours during the middle of the day and the night, I still don’t understand it. But hell, the relationship didn’t even last two months. And so I wonder if it was time wasted.

We don’t talk anymore. Two weeks after that Monday he was still texting me every day. I responded like I would respond to any other friend. But after days spent texting throughout most of our waking hours, my curter responses and lack of trying to revive the conversation might have come off as cold from his perspective. We never did text as friends before. We never really were friends before.

Maybe we took things too fast. That was one of the reasons he proposed as to why things weren’t the same. Or in my words, “why we didn’t work.” Looking back now, it was probably true. I had slept in his bed after knowing him for only a few days. Kissed him before I had been sleeping in his bed for a full week. Exchanged a first the day after. But how do you slow down a speeding car with faulty brakes? Especially one that’s on a road that was so easy to drive.

The whole thing was foreign terrain to me, but he helped me navigate with experienced hands. He had actually just gotten out of a relationship. But he opened up to me so fast and we were spending so much time together that I couldn’t help but let myself get close. I honestly didn’t think any romance would happen. After all, the whole romance thing had never happened to me before. So why now? He told me I took his mind off her, and I was fine with that. I like helping people when they’re hurting, even if that means I end up getting hurt. In the end, we were both left crying.

I finally got to do things with a boy that I had wanted to do since I was fifteen. We held hands walking down the street and snuck kisses in public. I listened to him tell me I was beautiful as he swept hair from my face with his hand. I got to wonder if I had fallen in love and if he had fallen in love with me. It’s a shame it was all so short-lived.

Something’s missing. That was another reason he proposed. Well actually, it was more like something got lost. A puzzle piece to be exact. A piece of a puzzle that we completed too quickly by moving too fast. A piece of our puzzle that he had been trying to find for a month and a half. After he’d told me, I wanted to look for it with him. But how do you find something when you don’t know what that something is that you’re searching for?

You can’t.

Turns out that I wouldn’t even get the chance to look. After we talked that night, I woke up the next morning hours before him as I usually did. His arm still around me, our fingers entwined…and it felt different. And not the lacking different that he described, but different as in wrong. I cried before he woke up and then cried again when he got in the shower. It didn’t even feel right to give him my usual “good morning” kiss.

We drove to school in silence. I’m sure he saw the tears wetting my face the entire ride, but he didn’t mention them. We kissed for the last time as a couple before we parted ways to go to class. And before noon that day, via text, it was over.

As I told my friends one by one, the breakup became more and more real. Later he texted me saying he was thankful we ended on high terms because it was mutual, but I was on a low that was completely new to me: heartbreak.

From then on it was like my emotions were on a timed cycle. One week good, one week bad. Understanding the break up, then wishing he’d ask for me back. I heard somewhere that it takes half the length of the relationship for a person to get over it. But after one month had passed, I had yet to go a day that wasn’t mostly filled with thoughts of him.

Now I’m just waiting. For the next boyfriend. For the next time we’ll have contact. To see what our future holds, even though it’s most likely a future where we don’t end up together. I hope people are right when they say that time heals all wounds.

I’ve decided that the universe and the interactions of the people inhabiting it is nothing but a web of strings. Some people’s strings are significantly longer than others, but each is coated in a unique shade. And when someone comes into your life, those strings touch and the colors mix. Each person takes on a little of the other, and the amount that is taken on depends on how often they came in contact.

We intertwined for less than a third of a year, but it’s a third that I can’t take back or exchange, or even tweak. And as I go on in life, I know there will be things I come across that will solely remind me of him. Events will happen that I wish I could still tell him about without inhibition. He’ll be the standard I compare every other boy to because he was the first—he set the bar. Hopefully he didn’t set it too high.