I met him on the internet. It was a strange thing really, I wasn’t going to respond when he said hello, and sometimes I hate that I did. I wanted to rip his hair out of his stupid head but at the same time I wanted to run my fingers through his hair and kiss him. I hated him but I loved him, he made me feel alive. It was hard with him being so far away from me, I wasn’t even sure if he loved me the way he claimed he did. I found it hard to believe that anyone could love me; I was surprised I even had friends. I felt like an outcast in my own family and being the eldest of three children, growing up was hard for me. Not long after my youngest sibling, Kaitlin was born, I fell into a depression, and for six years I was deep in that depression. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I started to see a light in what felt like an eternal darkness, and that light just so happened to be him. He was my everything, and no matter how I tried to explain it, no one understood. My best friend Cailey would say to me horrible things. “He’s probably just using you”, “you probably mean nothing to him” she would say to me. As if those things hadn’t already been through my mind every single day, over and over again. But that didn’t make it any better for Cailey to say those things to me. I was so angry at her; I couldn’t look at her without those words echoing throughout my mind and without feeling the overwhelming need to vomit. Friends just don’t say those things to each other, especially when one of them is already going through so much already.
I wanted to get drunk, I wanted to go out and get so drunk that I would forget my own name, but I couldn’t. I was too young with too little of a future ahead of myself. My other major best friend, Matthew, was pretty much the only one other than him that I trusted. Matthew was who I turned to when I had nowhere else to go, he was who I turned to in times of need and he was always there for me as I was for him. I loved Matthew like a brother. He always had something nice to say to everyone and he always managed to get me back on track when I was straying from my path. At one stage in my life he was the only thing that kept me going, that kept me from ruining myself – or worse, ending myself.
He didn’t know much about me, but I guess I didn’t know much about him either, but we saw each other’s imperfections. And in seeing that he was imperfect, I knew that he really was perfect. The days we didn’t talk were just bad days for me. I would leave a quick good morning message for him before I quickly rushed off to catch the bus. Throughout school I would count down the hours and the minutes until I got to go home and talk to him again. I would often cry in the bathrooms during lunch break, and the days I had to work after school were the worst, they added an extra 5 hours to the day without him. I was obsessed with the thought of him, and the thought that maybe, just maybe he would eventually love me back. I knew that he would never be able to live up the boyfriend standards that I had built up over the years in my head, but I was happy with that, because I wanted him but the way he was. Him and only him. All the other guys became invisible to her in some sort of way, she could only ever see them as friends after meeting him. As my bond with him grew, so did my love for him. I was his, and no matter how much I denied it, everyone knew it was true, including myself. I was completely and utterly his, and he knew it. He had claimed me as his own. He crawled into my soul and branded it his, and I had hoped that I had done the same to him. Me being me, I had doubted that I had any effect on him whatsoever, but I clung to the tiny thread of hope that I did. I wanted to be his in more ways than just one. I wanted to affect him both mentally and physically. And honestly, I believed that he wanted that too.
One day he became infuriated with me and my friends. I understood why he was angry with my friends, but why he was angry at me? I’ll never know. All I knew is that he thought I didn’t like him anymore, which was completely inaccurate. He just couldn’t quite see that, no matter how many time I said those three words “I love you.”, it just seemed like he couldn’t accept it, or believe me. It was the same for me I guess. He said those words to me over and over again, but I could never fully accept them, or fully believe them. I had many thoughts, but “no one could ever love me” was a constant, reoccurring thought. “How can anybody love you if you don’t even love yourself?” I wanted to ask him, but I could never ask, because every time he spoke those three words “I love you”, I lost myself between thoughts of him and clinging desperately to the hope of the words he spoke being true. I could never understand why Jarred loved me the way he did, but I guess he could never understand it either. He would get jealous every time I mentioned one of my guy friends, Matthew in particular. I never could understand why, considering I think of him as my older brother. I didn’t dare tell Jarred about Thomas at work, he would have lost his mind. Thomas, an 18 year old attractive guy that I worked with, and Jarred, being the 17 year old, jealous semi-boyfriend he was, it would have destroyed everything.
When I was little, my grandad died from smoking, and I had never really liked the idea of smokes or the idea of having friends that smoked. So when I found out that he smoked, imagine my surprise when I didn’t even care. I was just like oh well then okay.
It took me a while but I eventually managed to stop talking about him at school. Kind of. It is really hard not to talk about someone when, at that time, they are all that you can think about. But yet again, he is all I thought about almost all day. I wondered if he ever thought about me when we weren’t talking, I never did get around to asking. I guess in a way I never wanted to ask, I guess I was afraid of the answer.
I was the strong one in my group of friends; I was the one who never fell apart, who always saw the best in every situation and the one who was always happy. That was the impression I gave them, that was the reputation I built up for myself. But my reputation, my public display of who I was, was all an act. I was strong, yes, but never falling apart? Lie. Always saw the good in every situation? Nope. And this one was my personal favourite, always happy? No fricken way. I was sad. All the time, it was like a never ending void of sadness. But then there was Jarred. He made giggles bubble up through the surface, he made me feel warm and fuzzy, he made me feel other things as well, but the most important of them all is he made me feel alive, like I had never felt before. I was afraid, so, so afraid of what loving him would make of me. I was afraid to get hurt again. I was afraid of rejection. Even when he was being dirty minded and rudely funny, I felt good. I felt so different with him. I felt free. With how I grew up, we didn’t have much freedom, we had strict rules to live by and if we didn’t follow those rules growing up, we were punished. My parents were always only ever angry at me, and I was the only child who got disciplined. Go figure.
Sometimes I just needed him there to hold me and tell me it was all going to be okay, even if he believed it wasn’t. I needed his faith in me. I needed him in so many different ways. I craved his touch, and I melted at the sound of his voice, even when he was demanding me to take my shirt off over a Skype call. It was so wrong but I didn’t want it to be right. If everything we did was wrong then I never want it to be right, if it was all a mistake, I would gladly go back and make that mistake over and over again.
Because that’s what love is, I guess. And in a sense, I guess I loved him from day one.
