To My Biggest Mistake,

Somewhere around a year ago, I was at your house decorating Easter eggs for your Greek Orthodox Easter celebration. I had never met your family before even though we had been friends since the beginning of the year. When we were done dying the eggs, we went into the office of your house and played Mortal Kombat with really terrible graphics where we battled each other and ended up in a tickle fight on the floor, and that’s when I figured out that you weren’t just the friend I thought you were.

The butterflies in my stomach didn’t last very long – by the end of May, we were over. Except although we were “over” by the normal definition of the word, you weren’t done with me yet. You really broke up with me three times, even though you only actually did it once, and each time you pushed me farther from you.

The first time was the actual act of breaking up with me. The act of walking with me through the neighborhood, pretending at first like nothing was wrong, and then taking my hand and saying slowly that it just wasn’t working – we were too far apart in age, we lived in two different worlds, you were going to be in college and leave me back at high school soon anyway. But the killer, the poison injected after the sting, was the comment that might have gone unnoticed about missing your ex. Somewhere within me, I knew you still loved her and that you would never love me the way you loved her, but I hadn’t minded before because I knew I wasn’t in love with you either. But somehow when you’re being broken up with, the fact that you miss your ex-girlfriend is the last thing you want to here. It’s like saying, “You don’t measure up, babe. You’re no her.”

The second time was a month later, when you asked me for a second chance.

“I was wrong, and you were right. I didn’t give us enough of a try, and I’m willing to give it another one if you are.”

Bull shit you were. After convincing me and persuading me back into a relationship that I had given up on and moved on from, you said, “Never mind.” The same reasons as before – too much of an age gap, you were leaving for college soon anyway. And after that, I thought you weren’t really a bad person, just a misguided, confused, stupid boy.

Months and months later, I was at the school’s Battle of the Bands when a girl came up to me. I didn’t know her, but I knew who she was – you had been friends with her, but I’d never met her before.

“I know you don’t know me, but I need to tell you the truth about him,” she said.

She told me everything – how you pushed her and almost made her have sex with you, how before the incident she thought the same of you as I did then, how she had no idea when she was kissing you in the beginning that he had a girlfriend at the time.

“If I’d known who he was and that all the time he was kissing me you were sitting at home and wishing that he wasn’t having a guys night out again for the second time this weekend, I would never have done it,” she said, “and I’m so sorry, but I just wanted you to know.”

One would think that after all you’d done to me, I would have gone home from that Battle of the Bands show and cried my eyes out like any normal teenage girl would, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sad. I was just angry. I was wishing that you were the person I wanted you to be, the person who I met at the beginning of my freshman year. I wanted you to be the person who would wait for me at my locker every morning with a smile and a hug and the new CD I had asked you to burn for me. I wanted you to be the guy who had taught me to play Mortal Kombat and then ended up in a tickle fight with me for half on hour on his office floor. I wanted you to be that dorky guy with the dorky smile and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish hat on, typically facing forwards but sometimes sideways or backwards. But you weren’t – you were a lying, cheating, fake, stupid college boy who, no matter how big or strong he was, would never be a man in my eyes.

I want you to know that I’m happy now. I have a boyfriend who won’t lie to me and say he’s going on guys-nights-out and instead make out with and almost rape a girl in her basement instead. But for one reason or another, when the songs you gave me come on my iPod, I always picture you the old way. The way I want to picture you.

I saw you the other day. You were bringing stuff from your car to the Music Parents’ Association Yard Sale where I was helping set up. Your hair was longer, but you still had on that stupid Notre Dame hat on. I was the one in the heels, denim capris, and teal shirt. The one whose eye you avoided the whole time. When you walked in, my heart stopped for the fear of you approaching me and saying something.

And yet, when I walked by, I held my head up high and looked you straight in the eye. I saw you look me up and down really quickly before averting your eyes.

Your parents recognized me, even though they never even knew we date because you were too embarrassed to tell them that you dated a freshman.

I wonder if sometimes, when you’re in your drunken stupors in the dorms of Delaware University, words will stumble out of your mouth about that freshman girl you once dated. Your drunken friends whom you’re trying to impress will laugh and the next day when you wake up in a pile of your own waste, you won’t remember that you said anything at all.