21/04/2024
I truly believe you can turn any experience into a lesson in love. You will never stumble across someone for no reason. I am a firm believer that love actually is all around. You see it everywhere, at home, in the school corridors, in the park. Anywhere and everywhere in between.
Love is something indescribable, no one forgets the feeling of their first love or even their last. First loves are often bittersweet, They don't always end how we hope yet we move on and keep going. We have hope in the fact that we will one day find love. True love .
My mum always told me you won't ever experience true love until you one day have children of your own. That is the first time you will experience true, unconditional love.
However, I beg to differ. I remember the first day I ever laid eyes on him. The first time we ever spoke. Ever hugged. Ever kissed. I remember the first night we laid together in bed, he held me as I drifted into a sweet slumber, wrapped up in the warmth of his body. I remember the time he danced around my kitchen in the early hours of the morning to This Charming Man by The Smiths with me.
After, we laughed about it and discussed how one day when we were married and settled in our lovely lakeside house with our 3 children we would sit together and watch the sun set whilst we recited the story to them at their dismay, for the five hundredth time. He was my first love.
We no longer speak.
In that moment, I believed that he wasn't only my first love but he would be my only ever true love. Yet here i am, we agreed some weeks ago that no contact was the best way forward for us to avoid making the same silly little mistake of falling for each other over and over again eventually ending up in the same vicious cycle we had been in so many times before.
The feelings will remain, words will go unsaid but nothing will take those precious moments away from us.
The highs were so high but the lows were so low. I remember the night I was laying off the edge of my mother's bed. We discussed how relationships change over time with maturity and experience. She told me she loved me more than anyone in the world and that's why she was the one who had to tell me I deserved so much better.
No one else understood where I was coming from when I repeatedly explained through tears and a broken voice than when things were good between us they were so good. However my mum did. She is and always will be my best friend.
She opened up to me , properly about the relationship she once shared with my father. She expressed to me she never wanted to see me in the position that she once found herself in, constantly trying to convince everyone around her that they had no idea what her relationship was like behind closed doors and always telling people that they just never got to see the good parts.
As I sat there, exhausted from explaining myself to everyone around me on why I chose to stay in that relationship regardless of how he treated me I told my mum that I loved him and I always would. No one was around to see us laughing at all the small things, when we sat in bed together in silence, no devices near us just enjoying the company of one another or when we would go out to eat in 'fancy' restaraunt and pretend we were other people because we were so bored of the bleak reality that encapsulated us. Yet she saw right through me.
She better than anyone knew the place I was coming from, she chose not to pick my outcome for me but to support and advise me on any decisions I made.
Once I had built up enough courage to tell her that we had ended things the first time she told me how proud of me she was and how she wished that when she'd been in that position she had had the strength and power to do the same. At that moment I was too embarrassed to tell her how deeply I regretted that decision and wished I had just stuck it out.
Things were rarely bad between us and when they were he would be the one rushing to me to apologise telling me how much he regretted what he had done or what he had said and I always allowed him to come back, who was I to turn him away?
For time after my mum still asked about him, she liked him. She told me many time how she loved seeing me so happy when we were together or when I had just returned him from seeing him.
She told me how she loved the sound of my laughter when I would sit on my own bed, kicking my feet talking to him over the phone about all the silly little things I had gotten up to that day.
Beautiful souls attract beautiful souls. He was a good person, he had a good heart and that's where I got my closure There were never bad intentions on either side, he loved me and I love him but it just wasn't ever meant to be. Fate was against us.
The last time we spoke he apologised for how he treated me, he told me that I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I didn't know how to respond. For the first time in my life I was speechless. I looked at
him smiling with tears glistening in my sore, puffy eyes .
He embraced me in a hug, if I had known that would be the last time we would ever hold each other I would have never let go. I wasn't ready then and I don't think I ever will be .
He will remain scratched into my heart forever . I will always be grateful for the time and love he gave me, I will forever cherish the precious moments we shared together and I will forever compare any man that comes into my life to him.
When I eventually got around to telling my friends our dejected outcome they expressed to me how happy they were for me, they told me I could finally focus on myself, I didn't have to be constantly worried about whether or not I was putting in enough effort anymore or if I was coming across too heavy.
They told me that I could finally move on and be happy yet I don't think I will ever truly move on. He gave me so much, he gave me the world and then snatched it right back.
I think about him from time to time. I wonder how he's doing, how is family are, what he's up to, whether he still likes the same movies, listens to the same music, whether he still wear the same pair of jeans he was so obsessed with.
I ponder about all the small little irrelevant things that don't affect my life in any way but I wonder about him, i love him.
