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I can even now remember how my heart beat like a staccato, my pulse so vibrantly tick-tocking for the first time ever through every single vein in my body, as he walked across the park towards me. I never knew then how much he would completely break me.
You see, I’m not the kind of girl that easily falls for a guy. My mother, an amazingly strong woman herself, had taught me the ways of the world as best as she could. She never hid things or denied things about how the real world worked. She always straight up talked about the world along with some of the many facets of people, and many times, about the types of men who would someday cross my path. I may have been raised on a bar stool, with the real world revolving around me daily, but I was a good girl. A girl with morals, who worked hard, did well in school and who dearly loved and respected her family.
But neither my mother, nor me, had foreseen what was about to crash into my world that day when she dropped me off at the park to meet him...
Tall, broad shoulder, and devilishly handsome.
The moment my eyes connected with his, my whole world started to change.
Because I fell in love.
I fell in love so deep that I never saw the warning signs...or perhaps I just chose to ignore them.
From our first encounter, Jake changed my life in ways that no amount of my mother’s real world advice or knowledge could prepare me for. The females that were part of my daily life at the restaurant, who often talked about how the men in their lives mistreated them - and yes, that I often thought were fools for staying with them and enduring so much, became me.
And it became my daily reality at just the tender age of sixteen. The time of your life when I’ve been told by other adults that was their best years, and that I should soak up and enjoy every single second of those sweet sixteen years. But because of Jake, because I became that stupid girl falling for some stupid guy, it was the year of my life that would forever change me.
Would I have done anything differently if I had known what was coming?
The straight up answer to that is...
I’m not sure.
To be denied that feeling of being so totally and happily in love...I’m not sure if I could ever deny that it wasn’t the best feeling ever. To this day, that time of falling in love, experiencing what true love was and is...I’ve never experienced anything close to that since. So how can I say that I wished that I had been denied that experience?
I simply can’t.
But then other times, I think of the pain he caused me.
The continued deep sting of loss for who I had been – for who I thought I had been.
I think of the loss of the happiness of those sweet tender years, the emotional roller coaster ride of chaos he brought into my life, and then I longingly wish I’d never met him.
And all that I’m certain of to this day is that my life – my whole existence – will never be the same. Not after experiencing Jake and all that he was.
He was forever, and will possibly be forever, ingrained into my heart and soul.