I made a mistake (Part I)

This is going to be a three part post, since when I started it I thought it would be shorter but evolved into almost 4 pages... and I know my attention span is not all that long so I thought it was easier to split up...

The butterflies had returned. The anticipation was completely destroying me from within.

It had been almost eight months since I had seen her last and I had no idea what I would say, what I would do or even how I would ultimately feel.

My heart had been broken. It was left on the rain soaked road behind the dunes where she had spoken those words. I went back to that day in my mind many times.

“We have to talk,” the words were spoken quietly but I knew what they meant. My heart was already sinking, I had waited for this day the entire summer, waited for us to finally be together and hearing those words already hurt.

We took a drive out to the beach to talk. The rain was cascading down on the windshield as I stared into the darkness waiting for her to tell me what was so important. The tick of the wiper blades seemed to mimic the beating of my own heart as I already knew what was coming.

When she finally spoke, I never actually heard what she had to say. I knew the overall message. We were not going to be together, she was with someone else now and that she was sorry. I gave up my entire life to be with her, everything that I had worked for in the past. I had spent years envisioning my move to the west coast and here I was back on the east because all of that did not matter, I thought it was love.

Opening the car door, I felt the rain hit my arm, then my body as I walked out without saying a word. I needed fresh air. It was so stuffy in the car even if it was New York in November. Three days before my twenty-fifth birthday. I walked back down the road we had just come in on, not really knowing where to go. I knew eventually she would have to take me home, but right now I just kept walking.

I stopped to look back and realized that she was not coming after me. I was soaked from the rain and my body, heart and mind were beaten down because of the words she just said. I turned toward the car and walked back to her window. She rolled it down and I stared at her and slowly asked, “why?”

I never really wanted to know the answer, but it was the only thing that I could say. I wanted to be angry, I wanted to tell her to fuck off, but my heart ached and I felt numb now. We sat in silence on the way home, an hour drive to my house. I gathered my things and went inside.

Having just left my life in San Francisco I had nothing aside from the family left on the east coast, so I went to sleep and when I woke up I told my brother what happened.

It was not until six months later that he told me she called. I decided to stay in his townhouse and found a job and was starting to be happy again. Most of my relationships in the past six months were shallow and a few were very uncomfortable since I was trying to find what I had lost in someone I hardly knew.