When Love Ends

By Anonymous

One night, he said something to me that stuck in my head and rattled around there, banging against the side of my skull every time I moved. “You’re not going to be someone’s first love,” he said, “we’re just too old for that by now.” He was never very eloquent, but the way that he put this left a mark on me. I had told him I agreed, and in a sense, I do. We were very young, we still are, at the age of seventeen, but as you continue to live your life, the people you meet also come with more people. People they used to love and maybe still do, who they’re still dragging around behind them by their wrists. People who sit in on every conversation you have and every step you take together. People who will always be there, no matter how hard you want them to leave.

For him, it was his old girlfriend. Someone who he had been with for three years only to have her be unfaithful. He hated her, he told me, but he still hung on to to her. He told me that he would love her for the rest of his life. Her name hung behind the words he would say to me, and every time that he would call me beautiful or special, I could see her shadow lurking behind his shoulder as his hands clutched hers behind his back. I had someone like this, too. A person who I could never stop loving, who I still clung to like a barnacle on a sailboat. He saw my sailboat, too. When I would glance at the picture I still have in my room of the two of us together. When my voice would go distant and far away, because I wasn’t with him anymore, I was out sailing.

There were times when I thought I loved him. He could make me feel warm and safe and secure, but that love rose and fell like the silhouette of crumpled silk. Some days, I would get too little. I needed more than what he was giving me at the moment. I craved his company and begged for his words. Other days, it was too much. He suffocated me. He stifled and choked me with his relentless assertions of caring and devotion. He used compliments as a filler when the conversation came to a lull, and the worth of those compliments diminished in my eyes. What we had was a constant up and down, a pendulum swinging back and forth between overload and a lack of air.

He would disguise his feelings, telling me that the only thing on his mind was how beautiful he thought I was, but while he was showering me with adoration, I think that he realized, too, that we were crumbling.

I had been hurt before, a boy who didn’t care. I didn’t carry the boy with me all the time, but he came to sit with us sometimes. When I was frustrated or upset, I would miss the boy- his intellect, his sense of humor, the night we fell asleep while we were skyping and then woke up the next morning and watched cat videos together.

Other people would come round, too. A girl he had slept with a while ago, a boy I had talked to for a while. It threw me, but I didn’t mind.

Love ends when you start to mind. When the people your love brings with him start to chill you in their shadow, when their breath feels hot and damp on your neck as they hang over you, when they cough and break the perfect silence you were sitting in. I didn’t want guests in my house. I wasn’t prepared to entertain. I wanted him, and not the girl he was still clutching. I couldn’t fully have him, and I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t okay to keep trying, and maybe he wasn’t, either. There are lots of reasons why a relationship can end, but once your will and patience, worn down to a thin thread holding the two of you together, snaps, you spin out of their orbit. Maybe you float off into space with no direction, maybe you’re pulled toward another sun.

The vision is gone, the bubble I floated on for so long has popped. I’m tired of trying and failing and feeling uncertain.I have nothing left to give him, and maybe he has nothing left to take.

Soon, he’ll pick me up by the wrist, and I’ll hang loosely from his hand. He’ll drag me along behind him, and I’ll sit there with the other girl and watch with her as he begins to love the next one.