"I'm not saying that I have a bad life, but if you were to write a story with me in the lead role, it would certainly be a tragedy."
When I said that there was no way that my life could possibly get any worse, I was kidding. I didn't actually expect...
"Maybe really, really good things aren't meant to last for too long; maybe that's what makes them all the more sweet, the temporariness of them."
—Jenny Han, P.S. I Still Love You
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Have you ever met someone and just knew that forevermore your life was never ever going to be the same?
Well, that was the way it felt the day that I accidentally slammed my bike into Jamie's when we were eleven and thus set the course for the remainder of my childhood and teenage years to be filled with an elevated string of laughter, tears, a preposterous computation of annoyance, irritation, anger and yes, even this tragic story had a bit of love interwoven into it.
Jamie wasn't a stranger per se; he was literally the boy next door, but before that day I had never really bothered to get to know him. Sure, our parents had forced us to have countless play dates over the years but even then I'd kept my distance and he did the same. But it seemed that fate had other plans for us.
If someone had asked me three years ago what I thought about Jamie O'Connor, I would have told them without a moment's hesitation that if there was anyone in this world that I trusted with my life, my heart and my minuscule amount of trust, it was him.
He was the one invariable aspect of my life that was never supposed to change. Ever.
The funny thing about life though, is that it doesn't matter how many plans we make or how many stars we wish upon that things will turn out exactly the way we want them to, it just never does.
Our futures aren't set in stone and most of us fail to realize that until it's much too late to protect our hearts from their inevitable doom. And I say 'doom' because for the most part, the majority of us never truly recover from a broken heart.
We push that hurt aside and try our best to prevent that feeling of anguish from ever recurring and in doing so, we build up walls that seem to go on forever and sometimes without meaning to, we break hearts as well. But everyone knows that there are no rules in love. You either break or breakeven.
On that note, it's acceptable to state that I had my first real heartbreak in my senior year of high school. Foolishly I had pushed aside all the rational explanations that I had for never falling in love and thus by no means ever seriously dating, and let myself be swept up in a whirlwind of teenage emotions and fell headfirst in love with Sam Harper. Needless to say, Sam shredded my heart to pieces in one of the most cliché ways possible. He stood me up on the night of our Senior Prom.
Despite the fact that all through my high school days it wasn't exactly a dream of mine to attend the most ostentatious event of the year, I eventually reconsidered that notion when I started dating Sam. Any girl who's ever been foolish enough to fall in love will tell you that being stood up by that person is way up there on the list of ways to crush your heart and plunge you into a world of despair.
