Picking Petals

The Thin Line Between Love & Hate

A/N: Wattpad Romance Short Story Competition Entry for "600 words of love"

Summary: An older woman named Anastasia writing a letter to her first love, reminiscing the memories they made together.

You can now find this short story published on the online literary magazine "Germ Magazine."

Here's the URL, if you're interested (I've also attached it in the external link): http://www.germmagazine.com/the-thin-line-between-love-hate-by-kiana-marsan/

Also, this chapter is dedicated to @-psionic- for the amazing cover! 

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Jasper-

There is a thin line between love and hate.

I know this from experience.

Too many sleepless nights my body would shake with violent sobs, and would ache in pain. My heart yearned for your presence beside me, the low, raspy voice of your sweet nothings, no matter how much I would try to deny it.

You held the power to break me, and to control my emotions at your whim. I considered myself a strong person, yet when I was with you I became spineless-unable to withhold my desires. I would take one look at the devilish smirk that was so kissable, that bright red tousled hair that was begging to be ruffled, and all anger and resolve would melt away into a puddle at my feet. It was masochistic-each time you hurt me, I came back to you for more.

Our love turned me into a person I hated-needy, dependent, and fearful-and for that, I hated you.

But, I couldn't stay away-it seemed as if fate always brought us together, under the most oddest of circumstances. When you swaggered up to the kissing booth at the town's fair assuming I was the one running it-when in fact it had been my best friend, Madison, who had gone on a bathroom break-and collided our lips together with more passion than I had ever been kissed before, our destiny was set in stone.

You were the one who I wasn't supposed to fall for, who wasn't supposed to be right for me. We were too different, immersed in lives the other couldn't ever fully understand for the life of them. Yet, we did.

Our love wasn't a choice-it was inevitable, and impossible to stop from happening from the moment I lost myself in those emerald green eyes. We fell in love for each other without realizing it, our hearts fitting together like puzzle pieces. Our love story was the greatest adventure I had ever been on, the largest of all roller coasters to ride.

In our future, we held a tangled web of secrets, lies, and betrayals. But, despite the odds, in the end, it was the cruel twist of death that broke us apart.

Did you know that there was a one in three-thousand chance you would have gotten struck by lightening that day?

That day that you were running after me in the pouring rain during a thunderstorm, determined to prove to me that our love wasn't simply some fling, and you were in our relationship for the possiblity of forever.

I wish I had believed you.

At your funeral, your mother told me you had even been saving up money from your minimum-wage job to buy me a ring.

For a long time, I was broken, my heart shattered in a million pieces. Everything I saw reminded me of you-I hated life, and God for taking you away from me.

But, as I clutch the love letter I found under your old bed that you wrote so many years ago but never gave to me-full of eraser markings, crossed-out words, and sloppy handwriting-I've grown immensely since then. I'm a thirty year old woman who's moved on with a new husband and two kids, but your name is still engraved in my heart.

It always will be-you were my first everything, and I'll never forget you, and what you've given me.

You taught me how to look past all of the hatred and despair. To embrace the love beneath it all, and follow my heart and accept where it takes me.

Thank you.

Love,

Anastasia