Turning Point Part II

If you missed the last post, I recommend reading it before delving into this one, as it has the entire back story.

I left off with all of you feeling warm and fuzzy about my first love. It was a great time in my life, and one I remember fondly.

About 6 months into our relationship, things started to go south. He started to get depressed. We were about to graduate from high school and move onto real life. I don't know if it was the magnitude of that hitting him, but he was changing. He started to become dark. He had gone from being sweet to almost being cruel. I asked him many times if he wanted to break up, and he assured me he didn't. He told me I was the only thing good he had in his life. He asked me to be patient and to please stay with him. I loved him, so I did. As he went off the deep end, I went with him. I will spare you all the details of the next month, as it is just a sad story.

I realized on July 24th, our relationship was over when his parents asked me for his class ring back. They made up a story about wanting to get it engraved. I knew the truth. He was too much of a chicken to tell me goodbye to my face. In the two weeks that followed, our phone calls didn't happen every night anymore, and when they did, they were depressing. Then one day he told me he was going to live with his grandpa for a while to help out on his ranch . He told me to wait for him, and that he would call me when he got back and had things figured out. I never heard from him again.

In the weeks that I waited for his call, I wrote him letters. I poured out all of my feelings about what he was doing to me. Some of them I never intended to send, while others I knew I wanted him to read. Two weeks before I was to go off to college, I wrote him the final letter in which I called him a coward. I told him that I was done waiting, and that I was moving on with my life. As I always do when I part with someone, good or bad, I wished him all the best in his life.

Within the first month at college I had a new boyfriend (I had taken some bad advice to move on by finding someone new ASAP). We dated for about 4 months before my feelings for my previous boyfriend prevented me from feeling anything toward the current one. Who, by the way, was the most perfect man I have ever dated. Not perfect for me, but just perfect in general. We should have worked out, but I had too much baggage. The sad thing is, I didn't cry because we didn't work out, I cried because I missed my old boyfriend still. After we broke up, I refused to date. I didn't want to be looked at by guys, touched by them, or even breathed on by them.

I was going through my turning point. I was discovering myself and my worth. I began making all of the relationships in my life closer. I started to appreciate all of my family and friends even more. I was realizing what I really wanted in a husband. My whole life was doing a complete 180 from where I had been before I met him. Maybe that would have eventually happened had I not met him, but he got the ball rolling. I learned so much about myself and who I was as a person. I laid out what I thought was acceptable behavior from people around me and what wasn't. I was going from someone who was borderline bitter for no reason to someone who was appreciative of life and everything it had to offer.

The woman who popped out the other side was a woman completely different from the girl who went in.

Two days before I married my husband, I had a dream that I went back to my first love's house. His mother answered the door and was so excited to see me. Like her son, she thought I had returned to marry him. When he came around the corner, we embraced, and he began to tell me he knew I would come back. I sat him down on the couch and told him that I was actually going to be married to someone else in a few days. I informed him I had only come to thank him for being such an important part of my life. I didn't regret one bit of our relationship, and that all of it made me who I am today. I had learned so much from the experience, and I was grateful for the blessing it was in my life, even if it was hard at the end of it and for years afterward. My life would have been so different had he not been in it.

As I always do, I wished him all the best in his life and hoped that he found happiness because he deserved it. I then walked out of his life for good.

I wouldn't change a thing.