Wish You Well

Life is life. It is interesting. It is cheerful, hurtful, spiteful, lively, shocking – it is emotional.

And sometimes I can’t help but think about all these emotions that I felt throughout the years. Felt and suppressed, a lot has happened in my 25 (almost 26!) years of life. And I don’t want to forget it – no, no. I want to remember all of it. Every single detail, I want to remember. It is fun to go through old pictures and have the memories float through your head of what happened that day, with that person, in that place. It’s fun to read old emails and letters, feeling all of those emotions come back to you, remember how you felt about a person at a certain time in your life.

It is nice to go through old memories and think, “wow, I was loved.”

In the past year, I have grown up a lot. I started dating a man – it’s important to note that I am saying “man” and not “boy”. I have dated a lot of boys throughout the years, but now, I am with a man. He has a career that he cares about, a family that he enjoys spending time with, and a son that he loves dearly; which means that he has a family and a son that I spend time with and love dearly. That also means that I have given up my party ways, my silly, indecisive ways, and I have stuck to this boy. I haven’t played games with him, nor him with me. We’re just together, through good times and bad. We’re an item. We’re “going steady”.

And I think that’s why I have reached deep into my memories these past few weeks to relive things. In no way is our relationship boring, I am having the most fun of my life, and I have never been deeper in love. So I started wondering about my past loves.

I think of their faces, of our ‘love’ and promises, and wonder what happened to them. I don’t talk to any of my ex-boyfriends, and not because of any type of hate, at least not on my part. It’s as if we just outgrew one another.

There was one boy, and we were crazy for one another. We were 18, I was his first girlfriend, his first. He came with me to my grad, bought me flowers all the time, went ahead of me to the beach on a day he knew I was there with a friend to write our names together on a rock in a heart. I was head over heels for him, and him for me. But I was young and emotionally damaged, and by accident, I emotionally damaged him. For months after we broke up, nothing changed. We would hang out, hold hands, go on dates, just being in love. Always saying that we were meant to be, it just wouldn’t work now because we were young. In the future, we would be together again, we just knew that we would. Maybe that’s why we had to stop talking. I tried to keep it going, mainly because I couldn’t let go of him. The only boy that treated me so nicely, that never truly expected anything  but for me to be me. We would have been great for one another – however, I do like spending more time at home than I do going out to party. That was our downfall: I don’t care for people, while he is very much a people person.  I often wonder how he’s doing in life, just because he was such a nice boy.

I did tell one of them to never talk to me again, the boy I dated before my current relationship. Not to sound like I have a big ego, but I never truly felt that he got over me. He always just wanted to ‘help’ me, he always wanted to be there for me. He treated me like a child when we were together, and three years after we broke up, he was still there, trying to help me in any way possible that I would let him. I felt suffocated, and he made me feel broken, when I was complete – especially once I didn’t have him in my life. I sometimes wonder where he is in life, and sometimes I hope that I will see him again, especially when I’m with my boyfriend, just so I can say, “See? I don’t need you. I have a perfect life, that I got on my own, without your help. Because I’m not helpless, and I’m not broken.”

I’m not that old, but I’m already enjoying taking strolls down memory lane. Sometimes you don’t really realize what’s going on in front of you until hours, days, months, maybe even years later. Only now am I seeing some of the repercussions of some of the events that had a play in my life. But I don’t regret anything. Everything that has happened to me helped me become who I am.

Maybe I could have been a better person, but then again, maybe I could have been worse.