Raine:I’m on my way to your dorm.
That night, I sobbed into Raine’s arms, feeling humiliated, saddened, and furious. My core hurt as I cried, my words inaudible between my hiccuping. She soothed me, rocking me back and forth in her arms as I fell apart for a boy who’d betrayed me in the most painful way. Not once that night did Raine scold me for crying. She simply held my broken pieces in her hands and told me to let my emotions out.
32Shay
Once upon a time, I fell in love with a boy.
A beautiful, broken boy who had his own world of struggles.
Years ago, Landon Harrison had promised to come back to me after he found himself, when he got better. Years ago, he’d said he would find his way back to my heartbeats. The problem with making those kinds of promises in your youth? There isn’t enough adhesive on the love story to make it truly stick.
We were both young, naive, broken kids. What did we know about love? What did we know about true feelings? What did we know about making things work?
In the storybooks, when a man made a promise to a woman, he always came back. He’d ride in with a grand gesture, and he’d fix whatever mess he’d left her in. He’d confess how the past years of his life had been filled with struggle and hardship, and he’d go on and on about how her love was the only thing that made him able to breathe.
For a while, I thought that was what was going to happen. For the longest time, I sat around waiting for the big gesture, waiting for Landon to come rushing in on a white horse, telling me all the words I wanted to hear. He’d missed me. He’d fixed his broken heartbeats. He was ready for our love story to receive the happily ever after.
But that never happened for me.
Years passed, and Landon never once looked back. I knew he’d found himself, too, because he was all over the internet, onbillboards, burning up the big screen. He was no longer Landon Harrison, the boy I once loved, but he became Landon Pace, Hollywood’s golden boy. I saw his smiles on Jimmy Fallon. I watched him grin from ear to ear on red carpets. I watched him flourish into the man I always knew he was capable of becoming. He blossomed and bloomed like peonies in the spring, and he completely forgot I’d ever existed.
Landon became a megastar in Hollywood, and I had the privilege of watching him win time and time again from a distance. He was the Brad Pitt of this day and age, and I was the creepy ex-girlfriend stalking his Instagram, following stories on TMZ about who he was sleeping with, what party he was attending, and which yacht he was taking out for his annual birthday bash.
He spent his birthday on a yacht with dozens of supermodels. If that wasn’t a blow to my ego, I wasn’t certain what was. For a little while, his birthday had been mine. His hands had rested against mine.
He had been mine.
If only for a small moment in time.
Along with watching him succeed from a distance, I also watched how his relationships spread like wildfire. Landon was a serial dater who made Leonardo DiCaprio look like a down-to-earth family man. I was somewhat surprised he hadn’t found his way back to me, because he pretty much found his way to every other single woman on the planet.
I mean, honestly—how could he go on and find himself and forget about ever, oh, I don’t know, thanking the one girl who pushed him to do exactly that? How could he move on so quickly with movie stars like Sarah Sims and not even offer an apology? How could he go and never look back?
If not for me, he never would’ve been interested in acting inthe first place. If not for me, he never would’ve known what a script looked like. I opened those doors for him, and he walked right in without looking back at me for a split second.
While he was off living in la-la land, I was receiving rejection letters left and right, struggling to figure out a way to make my dreams come true. Then there was sweet ol’ Landon, eating steak with the Rock—probably even calling him Dwayne like they had an actual friendship—while I was trying to figure out how to not eat ramen noodles three times a week.
Life wasn’t fair.
He was living the dream I’d set out to achieve, sleeping around with EGOT winners, and I was struggling to pay back my student loans for a creative arts degree I never used.
Each time he appeared on television, social media, or during the previews at the movie theater, a part of my soul burned with pure rage. I went back to basics with my feelings toward Landon, back to the days before our stupid high school bet ever took root, back to him being Satan—nothing more and nothing less.
I once told a few coworkers at the coffee shop I worked at that Landon and I used to date, and they laughed straight in my face.
“Sure, and I dated Rihanna.” My manager Brady chuckled. “Oh, Shay. You and your humor.”
I never brought it—or him—up again. I’d spent my early years being a complete idiot, thinking there was a chance Landon was going to come back to me. I refused to do the same with my thirties.
My teen years had been a time for stupid love mistakes.
The rest of my life would be spent discovering self-love.
In the past, I believed in fairy tales. I believed in true love conquering all, but now I was old enough to know better.The only love story that mattered was the one I lived with myself. If I was in love with me, it didn’t matter if some man was, too. My love had to be enough to keep me warm at night. So I started to fall in love again—with me, with my life, with my dreams.
I told myself day in and day out that I’d be ready if the time ever came for Landon and me to cross paths again, but I knew it was impossible to be prepared for such a day. Not after what we’d shared. Not after what we were. Our time together was a single leaf floating away in the breeze with no sense of direction or destination, but our love was real even if it only existed for moments. First loves were different. You never saw the flames coming before it was too late, and you were left scorched.
I didn’t believe you ever fell out of your first love. You simply allowed it to live in a small corner of your heart, taking up prime real estate of your soul.