The Heartbroken Heartbreaker

prologue

Prologue

I wonder why it's called falling in love when falling implies collapsing; and collapsing implies breaking.

It's like saying that people have to fall first before they can be in love; that the latter can't exist without the former. The phrase itself attaches weakness to the word love.

But maybe that's a good thing. If there's anything I'm certain of when it comes to a concept as pretentious as love, it's the fact that it makes people weak, and that's where the irony lies.

People always see love as something grand, something we need, and we all momentarily forget that in order to be in love, we have to collapse, not just into it, but sometimes also out of it.

And that part is never as easy as that first initial pull. Falling out of something means landing someplace else, and more often than not, we find ourselves crash-landing into uncertainty.

That was where I found myself the summer before junior year, after Cedric had broken up with me. I was left alone, trying to dig my way out of the crash site, wondering where exactly I landed and counting how many pieces of myself had gone missing from the impact.

There were a lot.