Buzz buzz. I paused the t.v., popped one last potato chip in my mouth as I pulled my phone out of my back pocket to see Austin’s name pop up on the screen. I rolled over from my stomach to my back holding the phone over my face smiling, my heart growing warm as I opened the text. 

My smile dissipated almost immediately. I quickly sat up as if the angle I chose to lay in had somehow clouded what I just read. “Sayde, I think we need to break up. I’m so sorry.” My stomach was burning, flipping, as if I were on an elevator that gave out on floor 5 dropping to ground level. It was so vague, and so cold. It couldn’t be Austin on the other line. He wouldn’t do this. It can’t be him. The guy that everyone said was so smitten over me; So smitten over the girl who had finally captured the mysterious boy's heart.

 

I stared at my phone, unblinking, until my phone buzzed again. “I think I’m just confused, I’ve never been with someone this long, and I just need some time.” the text read. The elevator inside me kept dropping. I couldn’t get my bearings, or make sense of it all. I felt betrayed. We were just together last night, everything felt so right. What did I do wrong? What happened between now and then? Was there someone else? 

 

The sense of betrayal started to morph into anger. I tried begging for him to stay, but he was insistent  that we were done, but he loved me. Those two points didn’t seem to work together in a sentence. 

 

I’d waited so much longer to date, than any of my friends. I didn’t want to date just to date, I wanted something deeper, but I also felt deeper than most people, in love and in heartbreak. The intense infatuation one moment, then an abyss of pain the next, darkened me. My sense of self-worth dropped with my heart that day, and it didn’t see the light for several years. 

I heard if you love the first guy you sleep with, you’ll never get over him if it ends. Austin & I never went all the way, and it still hurt like hell. I couldn’t imagine if we would’ve slept together. I arranged to sleep with a friend, so no one could ever have that kind of power over me, and I lived a lot of my life that way after Austin. Keeping people just enough at a distance that it wouldn’t shatter me when they were gone.

 I didn’t yet know how the walls we build to protect ourselves can become our own prison, and that the courage to break them down, share our love, our joy, our life with people, is the greatest gift we have in our short human experience.