Why It Still Hurts

Why It Still Hurts
a memoir by Nikki England (9/1/11)

It’s not because I still love him. I can’t stand to be around him anymore. I don’t miss him. I miss who he used to be. The boy who I’d fallen in love with my junior year of high school. I remember how it all happened, too.

Before I fell for him, we were friends for about a year. We met in our sophomore year, and he used to bug me to high hell. We weren’t very nice to each other, but we eventually grew up a little and started being better friends. It was back around the middle of September of last year. We both had the same lunch period together.

One day, he decided to playfully stare at me, sitting across from me with his hands folded in front of his mouth and his eyes squinted at me. To keep myself from laughing, I mimicked him and tried to keep from smirking behind my fingers. One of our friends, who we called Gigi, jokingly said to him,

“Damn Ka-chan (that’s what we called him), if you wanna stare deeply into
her eyes like that, just ask her out on a date!”

Of course, our first initial reaction was that of disgust and I didn’t think anything of it for a while. I can’t remember if it was that same day or sometime during that week, but I was watching him imitate an abridged episode of an anime series he liked. It was really funny because he was so eccentric. Without even thinking, I said to myself out loud,

“It’s fun watching him get excited like that.”

Of course, Gigi, being the total pervert of the group, made that sentence as dirty as possible and told him what I said. He thought it was funny. I didn’t think anything of that, either. Later on in the week, I slowly started to think about what was said during lunch. Eventually, I started to think about him all the time. I started to find him very attractive for various reasons.

He seemed very handsome and funny, and I just wanted to be around him all the time. I didn’t tell anyone that I liked him at first. I didn’t think I had a chance with him, so I didn’t think anyone needed to know. He had a girlfriend at the time, anyways. But somehow, all my friends were able to figure it out.

But even when they asked and called me out on it, I would always tell them no. Around the beginning of October, as he was leaving from our club on a Friday, he said,

“Hey, someone call me this weekend. I’m gonna be bored and have nothing to do.”

I took that opportunity with complete excitement. Later that night, when I had free minutes on my phone, I called him and tried not to wet my pants in excitement. I was so nervous, I didn’t even want to tell him, but I knew I had to once the dial ended and his voice replaced the ringing. I didn’t tell him right away. We chatted a bit before he finally caught on that I wanted to tell him something important. But I just couldn’t.

It was about an hour, maybe an hour and a half until he finally dragged an answer out of me. To my relief, joy, and over-amazement, he said he liked me back. I almost started crying with joy, giggling to myself as we continued to talk until 2 in the morning, when we both finally went to bed. I remember the long-term euphoria I felt as I giggled myself to sleep.

A week later, he broke up with his girlfriend just so he could be with me. At the homecoming carnival at school that following Tuesday (October 12, 2010), he asked me to be his girlfriend, took me to the marriage booth, and gave me my first kiss. I felt like my heart would burst with excitement at any second. I thought I’d found happiness and that nothing would ever separate us.

Everything was perfect for at least the next month and a half. One of my favorite memories from that time was on a Friday, when I had gotten my period. The cramps were excruciating and lasted even up to lunchtime. He noticed I was struggling to eat because of the pain and he held my hand, telling me the sweetest thing anyone had ever said to me in my entire life,

“Just squeeze as hard as you need to, baby.”

Later on that day, he was walking me home from school.

“Why did you let me squeeze your hand?” I asked.

“You were in pain,” he said. “And you were having a hard time eating. I’d rather you have food in your stomach and I have a broken hand than you being malnourished.”

My heart melted with pure delight as he said those words. I couldn’t possibly imagine how anything could’ve gone wrong. Then it all started to change when he started playing his little card games with his friends. He started ignoring me, he stopped wanting to be around me, he stopped wanting to be intimate with me.

My whole world fell apart. The euphoria was gone. I no longer felt that happiness. He’d treated his girlfriends before me so much better for even longer. Yet he pretended I didn’t exist. Eventually, he broke up with me on the last day of our junior year because he thought our relationship lost its spark. It had, but it was his fault for not wanting to be with me. I did everything I could to keep the relationship alive. I was almost willing to relinquish my dignity just so he would love me again. But he wouldn’t even give me that chance.

Now he won’t bother to look at me anymore, even though he said he wanted to be friends. I feel like if he would just talk to me about what happened, I wouldn’t feel so heart-broken and angry. Until then, I have to try as hard as I can to forget who I once loved and muddle through the rest of my life in romantic solitude.