We were babies.

One of the many, many sucky things about a break-up is trying to both hide the evidence of the relationship while it’s still painful but keep it for nostalgia’s sake because there WAS a time that this was an important moment of your life and you want to remember everything about your life.

Today, it was the Facebook cleanse. Hide the evidence. Stay friends with people but hide them so their posts don’t show up in your news feed. Change the album covers. For example, my “Prom 2009” album. I changed the album cover. But I spent a long time looking at that picture of us, dancing, looking at each other and smiling. The honeymoon phase of the relationship in full swing. I mean, we were young. I was 18, he was 17. We’d been together for about…a month?

I look at that picture and think, we were babies.

How could I expect that to last? High school relationships hardly ever do. It didn’t matter that it was a college relationship too, as we were together for all of both of our undergrad years. When we first started dating, we were BABIES. We were young. We didn’t have any life experience. We weren’t developed into the people we were meant to be yet.

I mean, I’m sure I’m still not the person I’m meant to be. But I’m definitely not the same person I was in high school. Neither is he. The people in that picture are not the same two people you see today.

We were falling out of love for a long time. He recognized it; I didn’t. I know it now. I know we are completely different people who weren’t meant to be together forever. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. For the most part, I’m doing really well. But some days are hard. I expect that’s normal after a 5-year relationship.

So for now, I focus on me. New Kaley has a lot to look forward to, and she can’t wait to see where life takes her.

RIP MWG

For some reason, I’ve thought about you more than once today. Maybe it’s the news of Joan Rivers dying, and the fact that RIP messages are everywhere. Maybe it’s the fact that on the radio this morning, they talked about watching the downfall of your ex, and I thought to myself that the people calling in should be careful what they laughed at. Because as I watched things happen to you that weren’t so ideal, I thought they were funny, too. Until you died.

I won’t forget the conversation in which I found out. I was at work, and my best friend from high school called. She hardly ever calls me… Maybe once every six months. And she especially doesn’t call me during work. Then, she told me not to cry, but that someone had died. I don’t know how I knew it was you before she even said it. She told me to guess. I started crying before I could even tell her I didn’t want to guess (because seriously…you find out someone dies, WHO WANTS TO GUESS who it was? Every single option is unthinkable.).

Of course it was you.

And now, I’m flashing back to the time we drove to Dairy Queen in a pick-up truck. I remember you throwing your napkin out the window. I remember it flying back into the truck through the back window that leads to the bed of the truck. I remember you realizing it was coming for you and sticking your hand out awkwardly in front of your face–wrist to nose, facing outward–and I picture the same thing happening as your truck slams into the back of a semi, ending your life.

I promise not all memories of you are so vividly terrifying. I think of you when I listen to Fall Out Boy, and especially when I’m at their concerts–I’ve been to two now, you know. Every time I hear certain Mayday Parade songs–especially Three Cheers For Five Years. It’s crazy how five years from when I first heard that song and associated it with you, you died.

I think of you whenever I hear a song from Annie Get Your Gun. Sometimes I think of you when I think of Harry Potter, since the seventh book is the reason we started talking in the first place. I think of you when I think of the movie, “Cars.” I think of you when I hear the song “Remembering Sunday,” because you once posted a Youtube video of you and a friend singing that. Same goes for the song “Jar of Hearts.” I think about you when people talk about having songs written about them, and how you told me you once wrote a song about me. And then I remember that I’ll never get to hear it.

I loved you. Then I hated you. Then I didn’t really know how I felt about you…

And then you died.

I don’t know what to write about.

My friend is pushing me to continue my blog, to keep writing, because she says I can write. Normally, I push back when I’m pushed. But this is exactly what I need.

The trouble is, I don’t know what to write about.

I think the goal of continuing the blog is that once I continue the blog, maybe I’ll keep going. Maybe I’ll finally write the novel I’ve been saying my whole life I’ll write.

I’ve been writing since I was a child. Even in elementary school, we had young authors’ conferences in the city, and participation was option. I always participated.

One year, I wrote a story about a pet horse–or was it a pet unicorn?–that went missing then was found. Another year, I wrote about girls going into a haunted house and became trapped there forever.

Since high school, I’ve had the same idea for a novel. It’s begging to be written. But I still haven’t written it. And why not? I don’t know.

In college, our professor would bring in writers. One of them, I can’t remember which at the moment–and heck, it might have been my professor himself–said that they’d had a similar situation to where they finally had to write it. And it turned out to be complete crap. But finally, they’d written it, so they could turn away and move on.

Am I afraid that’s what will happen to me? That the story that’s played in my head for more than six years now–well, the gist, at least, because obviously through six years there’s been some development–will turn out to be complete crap? And all this time spend thinking about this story will have been a waste? Probably. But all I’m doing right now is delaying the inevitable. Eventually, this story will make its way out. And it may be crap, but I’ll never know until I do it.

Now, someone, make me do it.