Taking Control

Chapter Eight - First Love Never Lasts

I first met Frankie on my second day of Year 7 in September 2015. He was in almost all of my classes and he was really friendly. He would even stick up for me if someone was picking on me which I really liked. We spoke over the next few months in class and I thought he was really nice, but I wasn't attracted to him at this point. By November, I was all over him however. I can't tell you exactly how I began crushing on him because I honestly have no memory of it. It was almost like I flipped a switch and it happened over night. One moment I thought he was a nice guy and the next I was falling absolutely head over heels for him. Although I had had little crushes and fake boyfriends in primary school, I don't count them and if anyone asks me who my first crush is I will always say Frankie, because it's true. He was my first proper crush, the first time I felt real feelings. I didn't tell absolutely anybody about this crush for a good 6 months, not one single person, not even my closest friends. I kept it all to myself and I didn't act on it. We continued talking in class and I would blush every time we had a conversation. This is when I really started writing songs that meant something. I had dabbled in writing since I was 6 but those songs never meant anything of course. By this point I was writing full on love songs and just song after song about crushing on Frankie. By about April 2016, he updated his Instagram bio which confirmed he had a girlfriend. I was heartbroken and I also wanted to know who it was so don't ask me where I got this sudden burst of confidence from, but I dmed him and basically said something along the lines of "Hi, I know it's none of my business because we aren't exactly friends but I'm just curious...who is your girlfriend?" and I immediately panicked after I sent that so I followed it up with "Sorry, ignore me, I'm just being nosey" to which he replied with "No it's cool, you're my (n word)" which I was gagged at. I knew it was a slur and I hated that he used it so I asked him exactly what he meant by that, to which he replied telling me it meant best friend. Best friend? Me and Frankie were best friends now? Cool, get in there Aiden! He showed me a picture of his girlfriend and she didn't go to our school. She was pretty and her name was Eve but luckily for me they only lasted about 2 weeks before they broke up. Another win for me! After that conversation on Instagram we actually became really close. We spoke every day and he even invited me to hang around with him at lunch. I had never had these feelings before so I didn't know what to do with them which resulted in me becoming very clingy and needy and fully dependent on Frankie's love and validation. My friends noticed that I was leaving them on a lot of lunchtimes to hang out with him and his friends which did cause a few arguments and after I badmouthed them all to Frankie he got invovled and defended me. My friends had all clocked that I liked him by now even if I wouldn't admit it, I did tell my friend Jodie around this time though because I needed to get it off my chest and I knew I could confide in her. She was the only person that knew until I would later admit it to my other friends a few weeks later. Dabbing and musical.ly were the cool things to do at this point so you bet I used them to my advantage to impress Frankie. I remember this one Friday afternoon I got a nosebleed in English and I was so embarrased when I had to go to the toilet to sort it out. When I got back to the classroom my class had all headed to the library so off I went to find them. When I got there I was greeted by Frankie sat in a chair chewing gum with a book in his hand and this was the first time I got turned on. I found the whole situation very sexy and the way he was talking to me felt so flirty and seductive - I was in my element! I messaged him a million times a day, it literally pains me to look back at the messages because I was so obsessed with him and wasn't hiding it at all. He started to feel uncomfortable around me because of how obsessed and needy I was, like I said I was not good at hiding it at all. One day I got insecure because I noticed he started distancing himself so I messaged him and asked if we were still friends. He replied with "yeah, but don't follow me around all the time because I have my own life, no offence" and my heart shattered. I got immediately defensive and sassy and said something along the lines of "I wasn't exactly following you around and I have my own life too but okay" but I wasn't done there. I sent message after message after message and he didn't reply to a single one. I then apologised to him and asked if we could be friends again to which he once again didn't respond to. My friends comforted me because I was devestated and things between Frankie and I were awkward for ages. I still really liked him for about a year after this and I couldn't get over him. I forgot to mention this but I had to continue sitting next to him in Maths and one day I saw him mouth to someone across the classroom that I was trying to touch him. I was most certainly not and I was absolutely not having these allegations so I proper lashed out and screamed across the classroom "NO I AM NOT!" and it turned into a huge thing. The teacher was quite old and he didn't care so he payed absolutely no attention to this, mind you. Long story short, the class ended with everyone looking at me and laughing saying that I had a crush on Frankie. My secret was out. Everyone knew about it and I got tormented for the rest of the academic year which was about 3 weeks. I remember on Sports Day in July 2016 I was sat with Jodie and her friend Malia who I had briefly spoken to throughout the year and loads of people came up to us and started winding me up about Frankie. He hated me by now and my secret was completely out. I had an eventful summer daydreaming about him, writing heartbreak songs, spelling his name with sticks, that sort of thing! When I came back for Year 8 he was still in my classes, I still sat near him in the seating plan because our surnames were like 2 letters apart on the alphabet, I still liked him, and I still occasionally got tormented for it. We both had had the summer to cool off so it wasn't quite as awkward as before. We weren't friends or anything but we spoke in classes and were pretty friendly. I remember messaging him in October 2016 because my friend Gabbi and I had spotted a clown. Just for reference, this was when the killer clowns were going around and it was a huge thing at the time so we were terrified and my first instinct was to message Frankie for what reason I will never know. He did kind of give us some advice but it was very vague. He messaged me in November asking if I used to like him, knowing full well that I did. At first I denied it but he kept asking me so I just admitted to it and said it was a long long time ago (in reality I still liked him.) He responded to that by telling me to kill myself which was great so once again things were awkward. By about March 2017 I had started to move on from him and we kind of just became civil, and it's been like that ever since. I don't blame him for any of this because we were like 12 and if I saw him now it would just be casual. We continued to see each other briefly in some of our classes until the end of school but we barely spoke and if we did it wasn't anything too serious. So that was the traumatic story of my first crush. I did grow quite a lot from the experience which I guess is always a good thing. This started an endless cycle of me that I am still in today, a cycle of always needing a man to feel complete. I am a hopeless romantic and I love to love, I love harder than most people do and fall very hard very quickly. I want to work on knowing that I am enough without having the love and approval of a man.