Revenge Is A Dish Best Served [Larry Stylinson]

Instalment Nine

There are moments, lots of them, when I wish that I had never learnt love to begin with. As I was growing and going through those crucial teen years of finding myself, it was during that time that I was learning about love as well. Only problem was, I was learning from the devil himself.

Once you start to learn love from the devil, you learn about toxic love, and once you've learnt toxic love, it's irreversible. They say you have three loves in your life, you only ever get three real goes at it. 

The first one being young love, the first time you ever get those dancing butterflies and sweaty palms, it feels almost like you're coming down with the worst influenza of your life. It's the idealistic love, the one that our parents read to us from story books as children, you do and say all the things that belong in literature and you just can't believe it's finally your time.

This is the furthest thing from real love and a boy named Michael in freshman year had me all up in the feels with this one. My first ever broken heart and I thought my world was ending at fourteen years old.

How naïve.

Then we move onto the second and we introduce, Hugo, junior year. The second love is labelled as the hard love, it's the one that teaches you your lessons and it's usually surrounded by lies, manipulation, control and hurt. Most people stay on their second love cycle for years, decades even, all with different people, but they are thinking they are making smarter choices than the person before yet fall into the same toxic web and its game over before it even begins.

The second love is a drug, and you get so addicted to the highs that this relationship brings that you just constantly search for that feeling.

I consider myself a master when it comes to this kind of love, I believe I am the reason for its invention after all, don't I just scream manipulation and control to you?

However, so did Hugo.

I was still only sixteen years old when I got into my endless cycle of toxic 'love'. And Hugo was my puppeteer. He knew exactly how to play me and just when I thought Michael had broken me, Hugo came along and absolutely destroyed me. I was never ready for that kind of hurt and it was from that moment that I didn't even want to think about this stupid third love. There was no such thing.

Hugo was older than me, that automatically gave him the control that he desired but I was in way about fall into that trap. I had power too.

Or so I thought.

Hugo knew exactly how to work me, make me think that I was in charge and that everything was happening the way I wanted it too, but when I stand back and look at it now, I can see the mind field he was walking me through. And I must thank him one day actually, he taught me many lessons that I needed to learn for later on in life.

Now I know what you are waiting for, some big extravagant event where Hugo and I are fighting tooth and nail in a Star Wars like duel and its fight to the death, that's how he ended up with his sorry ass in the ground. That's the story you're waiting for, right? Wrong.

Hugo was a shit boyfriend, but grotesque lover. Don't get me wrong, he was an absolute arse and perhaps what happened to him was just karma coming back to pay a visit, I will never know.

But I was Hugo's 'second love' as well, what a shit time that is, both people ready for manipulation and control coming head-to-head. It was exciting stuff. But no, he went searching for his third love. The forever love. The love you find when you least expect it and its all forms of wonderful. And he found it.