It all started one summer. It was a summer full of boundless love and mischief. Things were happy and easy, but non-committal. It was one of those times when you just felt happy to exist and that’s what it was. But nothing is ever permanent. He was leaving for college in the fall, moving half-way across the country, thousands and thousands of miles away. And it was the summer before her senior year of high school. Things weren’t complicated yet. But lofty anticipation is frightening and there was always something that held them back. They knew it couldn’t last. They knew their romance would soon come to an end. So they took it as it was and that seemed to be okay.

They spent their time venturing out. Each day was a new and different adventure. What else could they conquer with raw feelings and attraction? Kissing under the sun and loving below the moon. Every time one spent time with the other it seemed something of a dream to them. Summer dug its fingers deep down into them, brightened up their insides until their blood stream glowed golden. It guided the two lovers down the ***** paths of youth, carefree mis-happenings, and daydreams. Their heads were dizzied as they’d drift away with each other whilst sitting under a tree in the mid-afternoon.

He left and they were both sad but only for a little while. He will always have a special place in her heart, and she in his, but they were young and reckless and maybe that’s all they were supposed to be. They kept in touch by writing handwritten letters back and forth for the first few months he was away. She thought about him a lot. She was always at the back of his mind. He didn’t come home over Thanksgiving like he said he might. So her heart ached a little. About a month or so passed and he was back but things had already become complicated. Maybe even awkward. They were both sad, slightly bitter, but what else was there to do? It was over before it was ever anything, a lost cause from the beginning. Right? But it seemed a desperate hope kept bringing them back together, making their paths cross again and again. He went back to California and she carried on her mundane existence. Time passed. He finished his first year of college and she had graduated from high school. They were two completely different people than the summer before. Things became even more complicated, even more destructive.

They were reunited yet again and with liquor on their breath and old feelings wilting in their hearts, they got lost into the night with each other. The folds of the sensual darkness took them in and nurtured them only to poison them the next day. And the following days. And the following weeks. They would go weeks without talking. She even left the country for two weeks and they never spoke a word to each other. But things aren’t that simple and nothing ever ends that easy. He was scared and she was desperate for his affection. And still, something kept pulling them back together despite them trying to avoid the other. It was incapable of being ignored and brought with it a great deal of anxiety on both ends of the chain. Things were tense. They weren’t airy and simple like they were before.

Things are heavy now, there’s too much baggage. He says she is too good for him, that he doesn’t want to be with her because losing her is inevitable. He is consumed with self-hatred. He told her he hates himself too much to ever share any of himself with anyone else and it made her so sad. She said to him, “I just wish you could see yourself the way I see you,” and he just blurted out that he was in love with someone else. He apologized. It was someone back in California. But he still loved her, he was just confused and rightfully unsure as to how to go about addressing that. Her heart was weak as it dropped to her stomach when he said, “Can I kiss you? It’s okay if you say no.” And of course she said yes. And so he did. And then he left.