There are so many things that I wish I could tell you right now. So many things that I still feel.

I know you’d probably think that it’s strange that I still, occasionally, pine over you, and what I lost on a September day like any other, 2010. You’d probably tell me that it’s time to get over it and move on. But I can’t, and I likely never will (but not in a creepy way…disclaimer).

We were just two kids in a little beach town in southern California. I was seventeen and you were sixteen. It was the typically amazing high school sweetheart relationship. Later I was eighteen and you were seventeen.

I didn’t want to go to a school dance with a certain girl, so out of left field I invited the short, quiet, and shy girl to go with me (to a girl’s choice dance…that’s how much I didn’t want to go with the other girl). You knew that was the reason I asked you more than anything, but you didn’t mind all that much. We both had fun in any case.

Later it was ice cream, later the beach. We grew close. I fell for you. It seems you fell for me. I walked you to class, more than once calling to a passing campus guard to give me a ride in her golf cart so as to make it to class on time after walking out of my way to your class. I would do anything to try to make you laugh, to be around you, to get into your head, to understand you, to know you.

When we walked on the beach. When we found that one random concrete cylinder right next to the bottom of the cliffs. When we sat in it. When I pulled you in. When our lips touched, and touched, and touched again for hours. When that happened, I fell deeper.

We were together for a year, give or take. You were my everything. Quirky. Intelligent. Slightly quick to bristle. Perfectly flawed. Perfect with all of your imperfections. Your love for Queen, which I never shared, but always knew of and loved you for in a way that I didn’t/don’t even understand. Your obsession with Harry Potter, which I did share.

You were everything that I wanted in a girl. You were firm in your beliefs. You held your ground. You were so amazing. The fact that a perfect date in your opinion was a walk around town, holding hands like the two little lovebirds we were, impressed me. The fact that you hated me spending money on you, always saying that money didn’t buy happiness or love, impressed me more (although there were times when I was just dying to spoil you).

The first day you came to join me and my friends (before that we had only dated one on one) my best friend made the entire burger place give us a standing ovation. I never told you that the reason he did that was because I had told him that I considered walking around with you better than any prize or recognition that I could ever receive.

My friends and I would walk around campus singing songs from our upcoming plays. You weren’t part of that group, but told me in little notes that you loved that part of me too. That you found it kind of ironic that the quietest girl in the room would fall for the loudest guy, and vice-versa. I thought so too, but I loved you all the more for it.

You were the only one that I think I every really loved. And now you’re gone. You broke up with me over the phone while I was in a college math class. I left to try to sort it out, but by then your mind was made up. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

I went off the deep end for a while there, did you know? Did any one of our mutual friends (who you got to know through me) tell you just how much I was hurting. How much I withdrew? When you walked out of my life, something died within me. Something that now, three years later, I still think is dead. Something that I don’t know if I’ll ever get back.

To this day, I still can’t walk down those beaches without thinking of you. I can’t walk into that burger joint without thinking of you. I can’t think of Harry Potter, Queen, the Grapes of Wrath, the word MORP, Prom, or High School without thinking of your face and the image of our joined hands coming to the forefront of my mind.

I can’t say that I still love you. That would be strange and weird and creepy, I know. But I still very much love what we used to have. What we used to be. What you meant to me. I truly wish you happiness. But I couldn’t bear to tell it to your face. I always used to wish that we’d find ourselves alone, on the beach or on one of the playgrounds we’d mess around (not that way) and have a talk like the one in 500 Days of Summer (which, strangely enough, that movie reminds me of our relationship a lot). And that then I’d finally have the closure that I desperately wanted and needed.

I loved you L.

D.