Okay, so I'm not listening to Moonlight Sonata... I'm listening to string/piano covers of popular songs.. like Taylor Swift's Love Story. Is that still considered popular? It was way back when I was 16 and falling in love for the first time.
I don't want to dwell on this for long, but I figured this realization was worth some reflection. October has just begun... and if you missed that memo, you're like a week late. Happy October ghouls.
In our kitchen, my roommates and I share a white board calendar on which we put our work schedules, big events, birthdays, parties, etc. On the 1st, as I was rewriting the calendar/ getting rid of September I had a moment of sadness. I wrote up 23, 24, and paused before I could force myself to write up the 25th.
October 25. It isn't a day of remarkable history for the world, but for me... October 25th for the past 4 years of my life had symbolized the start of something that was beautiful, and joyous, and happy. But this year.. it is just a day. Just the marking of the end of the month.
Five years ago, I fell in love with a boy. He was funny, he was kind, he was handsome, and he fell in love with me too. We started this beautiful relationship full of new experiences and shared memories.. and now it's over. And, I know I'm happy. I know I'm happy for the time we shared together, and this time we have apart. I am happy for the woman I'm becoming and the woman who he helped me to become. From our relationship, I gained confidence, strength, and I learned a lot.
I realized as I choked back a couple tears that these past 6 months since we broke up.. It isn't that I haven't missed what we had... it's that I've been so grateful for everything I gained, and everything I took out of our relationship. For the first time in months, I stopped and took a minute to be sad about saying goodbye to something that held me together for so long. I went back to "the box" and went over some of our memories.
A picture of the chalk outline I used to ask him to a dance we never actually went to.. "I've been dying to go to Sadies with you.." Yeah.. I was that dorky. The roses and a journal entry about the night he scared the shit out of me in the park to celebrate being together for one month.. A picture of the cake he used to ask me to prom... The card he got for me.. I had been debating giving up writing after being rejected from a writing program... and he wrote me this beautiful (and mostly illegible) card building back up the confidence that had been lost, and remembering back, he gave me a bouquet of the most beautiful lilies and a pack of my favorite pens... Pictures from all of our dances.. the white rose from Halloween.. the dried corpses of all the roses he had ever given to me, with dates and occasions attached... all the little notes he passed to me in class.. the memoir I had written in questionnaire format about our time together.. the pictures from camping in Wisconsin together, and countless other valuable memories. Including the last sticky note "love you" and the page from my Calc notes after the first break up... where he asked if I was okay.. my response must have been a non-verbal one, because immediately below it, he wrote "me either". The ridiculously long message my best friend sent him before we got back together warning him and being overly (and lovingly) protective.. everything.
I'm an organized person. I compartmentalize everything. I compartmentalized him, or us. I put it in a box, literally and figuratively, and while I believe I can say I am moved on and have moved past what we were... I also believe its okay to revisit and remember the happy, remember the lessons, and remember the love that was there. Sometimes, I miss it. But I recognize, that moving forward, I will get to fall in love again. I'm not doomed to eternal misery because this one love didn't work.
If I have learned anything in the past few months that have been weighed down by loss, and goodbyes, and anxiety, and sadness, I have learned to be grateful for all that I have had and all that I have experienced. Those experiences and those people who have shaped my life have given me something that can't be replaced. The person I am today.
I will continue to grow, and experience, and love, and learn, but I am thankful to that first love for teaching me everything I know firsthand about loving and sharing myself with another person. Five years is a very long time to share with a person when you're only 21, and though we fell short by about 6 months, this five year mark still means something... though not the same thing it would mean had we never parted ways.
I'm grateful for the old meaning of October 25th, but I am grateful that from this year forward October 25th is just another day.
JustAnEnglishMajorGratefulForBreakingUp... (weird..)
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