The first time I thought I was in love was during my sophomore year. I'd barely known him for three months and we'd only been dating for a few weeks when he told me he loved me. I was hardly fifteen. The very idea that a boy wanted to date me was hard to believe yet here he was saying the three words I'd been taught my life depended on. I told him I loved him. I've realized now that before I said those words I'd never really loved anyone. And when I broke his heart and watched as his love turned to hatred, I realized just how precious love is. I learned that love is a push pin stuck in the side of your heart and once you pull it out your blood will leak into your lungs and you will drown in the very thing that kept you alive. The boy who said he loved me not a week before left a folded letter on my desk calling me a bitch. I learned that love and hatred aren't all that different. They both make you bleed in the end. He'd told me once that he didn't cry easily but I watched him as he broke down until his dark eyes were like rivers. He didn't make a sound but I could hear his heart shatter. The next day he came to school with cuts on his back like a monster had tried to claw its way out of his body. I spent the next week asking his sister to make sure he didn't kill himself. In the past year I've grown to pity any boy who will ever fall in love with me because I'm a hard person to love. My deffiniton of beauty is sparkling eyes and arms covered in scars but no one who has ever said they loved me has told me my scars were beautiful. All they ever saw was tradgedy. And I guess that's what I am. I was born an accident waiting to happen with lines on my arms that said 'cut here'. And when he told me he loved me I thought that meant I would never have to cut myself again but it really just meant I would have to hide it when I did. But after all that I turned him into a joke between me and my friends because laughing about it was easier than admitting I had hurt someone. Because the way he fuelled my hatred was supposed be the punchline when instead it reminded me I wasn't as good a person as I thought I was. The thought of how much he'd cared when I told him I'd tried to kill myself felt like sandpaper against the inside of my eyelids and I will never understand how you can give a shit about someone who hurt you so badly. And I will never understand how he could've loved someone so goddamn broken. But I can never thank him enough because he taught me so much about love. He taught me that I shouldn't have loved him. I should've loved myself.
