Broken Promises

I remember his eyes the most. Greener than a melon rind, with satiny black lashes framing the emerald orbs. And the poems he wrote me every day, full of pledges of love and romance. They were empty promises; the eyes and the poems alike. Both entrancing me in, and then letting me fall, like a wilted flower.

We were never great friends. But we talked a lot. Always passing notes in class and holding short conversations in the hallway. I don' t know when I first loved him. But I first realized it when I couldn't wait to finish Christmas break and see him again. Before that he had always just been the boy who sat next to me.

It's always an amazing emotional rollercoaster when you realize you like someone. Suddenly they become your whole existence. Every breath is for them, and every heartbeat. You do everything with them in mind, and not a momeant of your existence is spent without longing for them.

The day he told me he loved me, I was ecstatic. I was sure this was it. My soul mate had come for me at last. I was walking on clouds and flying through the day in a dreamy haze. I never even thought maybe my dream would become a nightmare.

A famous saying is "...it is better to have loved and lost, then to have never loved at all...". I agree with this, but I also beleve it is better to have been loved and lost then to have never been loved at all. Somehow it's easier if your months of dreaming had a little reality to them, instead of it being nothing but a giant fantasy.

Maybe he lied to me about loving me, as to spare me a crushed heart. Maybe he thought it would be a cruel joke. I don't know. All I know is that he never really loved me, (Well not the way I figured he meant anyway. Maybe he loved me in an obscure sisterly fashion.) or he would have never treated me with such heartless rejection. I thought he meant it when he said he loved me. I really belived him. I was wrong.

My last good memory of him was one of the lunch periods we spent together. When he told me the poems I had written were really great. I felt like maybe this was it, he would take me in his arms, and we would be "us" instead of "him" and "me". But lunch ended, and all I got was a smile and a wave.

Not long after he told me he loved me, we started to grow appart. We didn't see eachother as much because he started cutting class, hanging out with a "bad" crowd and doing things like smoking cigarettes, and weed, and who knows what else. The eyes that stole my heart became out of focus and puffy, and the poems he sent me dwindled to a precious few, and then ended completely. All my dreams of him and I were all I had left, and I clung to them mercilessly, as I did to what precious little we still shared. But my desperate attempt to get him back just drove him further. If I tried to get him to stop cutting school, he would skip more classes. If I begged him to stop smoking, he would get detention for smoking at school. Eventually he stoped all contact with me. All the notes, the smiles, the hellos and the innocent flirting was directed towards other girls, and I was left in his shadow, with only my memories to cry into.

School ended, and I was left with a broken heart, and a yearbook signed "...sorry...but shit happens...".

His eyes had promised me love, and his poems, the stars; but I guess some promises are made to be broken.

Essay Copywright Inner Eye Publishing 1998