Today I’m going to talk about heartbreak. Tomorrow, in honor of V-Day, I’ll talk about luuuuurrrrve. Because, you know, into every life a little heartbreak must fall. It goes hand-in-hand with luuuurrrrve.
Yes, heartbreak is something everyone experiences. It’s a “character building experience,” as my father would say. So, yeah, I have a lot of character. Enough with the character-building already! That’s what I screamed in my early twenties. (Luckily the heartbreak ended shortly afterward because I met my current husband).
I can still remember my very first heartbreak poignantly. I was, oh…fourteen, I believe. He was my first Boyfriend of Consequence. It was the innocent, new kind of love. The fourteen-year-old “going with each other” love. Do kids still say they’re “going with” someone or was that an eighties thing?
And, boy, I can still remember the day he broke up with me. We’d been “going together” for quite some time. I thought he walked on water (that opinion changed soon) and we would be together forever, (I’m glad I was wrong about that because I looked him up later on in life. Ahem). It was the middle of winter, snowdrifts up to my eyeballs. That afternoon I’d walked to a friend’s house and talked endlessly of him because I thought he was so cute and soooo awesome and incomparable.
Then I called him. And right there, on the phone, in my friend’s house, out of the clear blue heavily gray snow-clouded skies…he DUMPED my ass! He gave me a speech about a monkey wrench being thrown into a car engine or some such. The bottom line was that…HE’D MET SOMEONE ELSE! Dumped for another girl!
Oh, I thought my heart was going to disintegrate. I can still remember the sorrowful trudge through the snow to get home, my tears freezing to my cheeks. Ah, the drama of youth.
I was miserable for a long time, moped around and thought I was dying. I never went through the “I’ll get him back” phase that most girls and women experience in the initial stage of heartbreak. I went straight to the “that rotten scoundrel!” phase. But I was still heartbroken and despondent.
Months later, after my heart had healed, a met a new boy…and I broke his heart. Heh.
So it goes, round and round. Break, mend, break, mend. And then…sound of angelic choir… hopefully you meet The One. And that love is all the more sweeter for the bedrock of heartbreak it’s laid upon. But more on that tomorrow.
Can you remember your first heartbreak?
