i never wanted you to be bitterly stuck on me.

i just want us to die like we lived—with kindness and understanding, always.

i do not deserve

this bullshit.

i do not deserve

to be remembered

like this.

—and you fucking know it

we were golden yellow

until you threw black paint

all over the canvas

—you ruined it

first loves

don’t have to

be traumatic

or heartbreaking.

first loves

don’t have to

leave you reeling

and scrambling

to put yourself

back together again.

they can be easy.

they can be set down

with grace.

—the pain isn’t mandatory

i understand heartbreak. i have looked it right in its face as it has ripped its claws into me and left me shredded. i am well-acquainted with the pain that comes after. i know how it feels to have a first love die. i have felt its heart stop beating in my own hands. i have buried many more in the ground. and i treat the few that ended kindly very delicately. i know how rare it is to be able to walk away without anything more than a scratch. so i understand heartbreak. and i know that sometimes you hurt people more than you might think, and i know that sometimes the pain doesn’t come until later, until much later.

but dammit, we were fine. we were fine until suddenly you decided we weren’t, and i understand heartbreak, and trauma, and i even understand needing space, but we were fine. you can need space but still know that we were fine. you don’t have to rewrite our story as ugly and broken to not want to be around me anymore. you can say we shouldn’t be friends without telling everyone i’m a horrible person. sometimes needing space doesn’t need an explanation other than the fact that you need it.

i understand heartbreak. i have watched it gut me and leave me for dead. i have sat awaiting its arrival time and time again. so when i thought i might have hurt you more than i thought, when i thought i might have been cruel to you in the slightest, i walked through all of us, from start to finish. and even at my worst, on my ugliest of days, i was kind to you. and never, never did i fail.

i have had a first love die in my hands. i have been held in a chokehold by pain.

and dammit, we were fine.

we were just fine.

i hope

one day

i rest easy

with you

—as i always intended

to golden yellow,

before i was your first love, i was your friend. and at the core of our relationship, we were friends. the best of. i cherished our friendship so much, that i made an effort to keep it alive after we broke up. i had never done that before. before, when a relationship ended, i walked away entirely. i ignored the fact that i was losing a friend as well as a love. i believed that after some point, one could not exist without the other. but with you … i wanted to strip the love part of us away, eventually. i wanted to keep the friendship. i wanted to keep you.