When I Fell In Love

but you loved us both.

Each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. That is why you cannot love two people the same. It simply is not possible. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out of you.

-Wm. Paul Young, The Shack

Maybe that's why you chose her.

Years.

That is how long it took for my tiny little heart to mend it's pieces back together. Even so, after four years of searching through the cracks for every jagged piece, pasting them back in place carefully, there were still small holes where the pieces didn't match up just right to one another.

He changed that, or at least, he gave me a temporary solution to the pain in my chest, only to leave the tiny holes as gaping caverns.

This boy was the first boy to match me in origin and in color.

He knew understood my spotty language and identified with me in the ways that kids unlike us never could. We were the spots in crowds of varying shades of white and pink. We were the minority. We were two of a kind, us against the world.

Up until this point, I had thought I understood what it meant to be comfortable with my peers.

I had really had no idea.

Being around him was just relaxing. For once in my life, my chest wasn't so tight, so wound up, so scared to breathe too loudly or in the wrong way, because to stand out even more than what I already did was the last thing I wanted.

No, for once I could be who I was. For once I didn't have to overanalyze what it meant to be a part of the world I was in.

And we were happy. Until we weren't.

We were happy until I realized that tightness in my chest was slowly, but surely, beginning to return while I was in his presence.

We were happy until I realized it took more and more of me to gain his attention.

We were happy until I realized her bitchy look at me were looks of pity.

She knew something I didn't. She had something I didn't.

She had him.

And he didn't even offer up a meaningful goodbye, a false "it was a good run", an insincere "let's just stay friends". Silence rang over the distance between us. Silence reverberated in my heart, and in my heart is where that painful silence made a home.

For years to come, Silence would nudge the walls of my heart when my mouth opened to speak words of rebuff or anger. Silence was my reminder to roll with the punches, however literal they escalated to be, because to be replaced again was not an option. I tried to get rid of Silence, because it only made me feel weak and took up too much room in my heart and pushed at its confinements so hard I could feel it run through my body.

Hard as I may have tried, Silence would not leave.

And, ironically, the same pain that Silence was trying to keep me from is the same pain it eventually pushed me into.