The Summer I became Me

2030 7th of September

Dear Diary,

The summer of 2023. The summer I became me. The summer it all changed.

I'm ready to talk about it now. 7 years later, here I sit ready to finally admit the truth about the summer of 2023. I remember that summer like it was yesterday. The memories are still engraved into me like an open wound that’s not yet healed. I remember it all too well. Why? Because that’s when I finally woke up. I stopped tolerating life. I stopped surviving. I started truly living and noticing the beauty that’s around me. 

Love. Isn’t it crazy how at the cruel age of 16 you can believe what you had was love? Looking back I smile at my naive innocent soul. If only love were that simple. He was my world. If it were with him, I would have danced in a storm wearing my favourite dress. I would have let my world drown around me so long as he got to live in his. I was an innocent. I was pure. I was beautiful. Funny how love can be the thing to bring you to life and ultimately be the end of it all. Or maybe you, like I, didn’t experience this type of love. I felt as if he were sucking the essence that was me out of my body. I no longer saw the world in a rose-coloured gaze. I woke up. I wanted to dream forever. Nose in the books. Head in the clouds. Entirely oblivious to the cruelty of the world around me. I saw none of it until he forced me to. I couldn’t even elucidate. He wouldn’t even try to see my world. No, he dragged me out of my bubble. He gave me the gift of reality; a gift I wish I could return every day. My true love had me questioning who is it you really love? Do you love me? Or is it the idea of me you love, my dear? Because this was not love. He had me pleading. Please don’t be in love with someone else. Please don’t love the version of me that lives only in your head… love me. I was just a girl standing in front of a boy begging him to love her. He was irascible and I was confused. My cries were muffled. They were silenced. For I as a young naive soul had no idea what I was talking about. After all, how could a girl as simple as me be right? He didn’t see the world the way I saw it. For that reason, in his eyes, I was dumb, wrong and even boring. I wanted him to live in my world with me. Instead, he refused my hand and he took me to his dark, sad and empty town. A town where the girls in ripped jeans don’t get to rule the world. Not the way they did in my world. Wake up. He forced it into my brain. And so I did. I finally woke up.

That summer, I realised what love was. It was everything he wasn’t. I made a vow to myself, that not another second of my time will be spent with someone of that nature. Someone so cruel, the way they hurt you can only be described as ineffable.

Losing someone. No matter how grey they made your world, losing someone is a pain like no other. Especially when you let them go. It was the right thing, yet it still hurt like a wrong decision. The bravest thing I ever did was run. And when your pure outlook on life has been stripped away, and pulled from your grasp, you’re left completely and utterly alone. There is no longer a haze to get lost in. I was just a broken 16-year-old searching for a way out of the darkness that had clouded her life. I was left in a war path and there was no one else to fight it except me. All I could think of was how beautiful life used to be when I believed in everything. And everything believed in me right back. Remembering that I am not where I’ve been, I’m not my past, I’m not what my feelings are telling me I am, it was hard. It’s easy to let the monster catch up to you when you’re not even trying to run away. Everyone gets hurt and we all fall down, but what’s really important is standing back up. Yet nobody talks about how that’s the hardest thing of all. When no light is to be seen, darkness is all that seems to be in reach. That’s when the memories came flooding back and I could feel him again. How his arms wrapped around me after a long day. How he smiled so brightly, so warmly. Does he miss me? Was I something he could miss? Will another name ever rest on my lips? Will my heart ever beat in rhythm with another’s again? Was he my last kiss? When you’re 16 and suddenly everything becomes real, no other question will ever seem as important as the last. What if he was the one? Everyone remembers their first teenage heartbreak. It’s just a shame I had to experience the pain and heartache given only in adulthood before my heart could even catch up. A teenager should have never had to experience that type of toxicity and reality. I wish he were a better man. If fate hadn’t stepped in I don’t know where I’d be today. Long live the magic of childhood. Once you lose it, it never comes back. I used to be an innocent. 

I’ve felt clean ever since I let go. There was no more screaming underwater. No more suffocating love that wasn’t worth losing your breath over. If someone’s going to take my breath away, it’s going to be because I’ve found him. I’ve found the one. Since that day, I started noticing the world around me. Perhaps I stayed in the world I created for myself because, before that moment, there was no reason to leave. And yet, here I sit at 23 in my home. A home I love. Living a life I love. I left my own little world and I created a whole new one. You see, time runs out. Time will keep running out because everything beautiful in life is stuck living in servitude to time. The petals on your favourite flower, the greenery of the summer, the rain tapping on your window, even love. Something so perfect and enticing can only bloom for so long before time is up. Before its beauty must be stolen. Before the clock stops ticking. I learned this early on. When you find something you love, don’t wait a second to spend your life surrounded by that thing for as long as time will let you. People often think the world is cruel. However, I’ve come to realise it isn’t the world hurting us. The world lets us live. Time however locks us up and laughs. At 16 I opened my eyes and saw the beauty in everything around me. Suddenly, I noticed how the air smelt when I was walking to school, I felt the wind on my face and felt alive rather than cold, the hot sun felt like a loving embrace rather than something trying to burn me, and miraculously I felt truly and completely alive. Life became wonderful. Every day, even the ones trapped by a routine, every single day I noticed something new. The art of noticing.

People often say how young minds absorb anything like a sponge. Let’s make sure we’re absorbing the right things. I broke free from a toxic love, I didn’t absorb his venom. I said screw you to the time holding me captive in that relationship. I served my time. I learned the lesson of love. Finally, the pernicious hole in my heart had started to heal. At the perfect time in my life, I started absorbing the things that mattered. So, you know what I say? Drop everything now. Run to what you love. Run to your dreams. Don’t say yes to something knowing time will laugh at you. Knowing it'll hold you prisoner doing something that doesn’t make you feel alive. Go dance in the rain. Go get your romance novel moment. You’re the main character of your story. The plot. The setting. The entire book. It’s all yours. Don’t let anyone else write your story. 

That summer I needed to break. I needed to feel broken. I needed to sink to the bottom of the ocean and let the water fill my lungs. To feel suffocated in a way that wasn’t from a love that was threatening to steal the precious time given to me. I saw things from a different perspective down there. I could either give up. I could have let time win. It would have been much easier. Instead, I swam up. I broke the chain. I would not be defeated by a man who never once knew me. That was the moment I knew who I was. I wasn’t the girl who would let anyone force her to the bottom. I wasn’t the girl who gave up. I was not the girl who tolerated life. No, I was the girl who admired life. I was the girl who was going to make every moment count. Every day, every second, every moment. It all counts. It’s all beautiful. And it was all mine. This life? This gift? This is the best thing that’s ever been mine. 

Maybe 16 is too young of an age to grow up. Maybe I was still naive. But I hit the trenches. I looked rock bottom in its eyes. And I still found a way out when every exit was closed off. I see it all now that he’s gone. He was older. He was mature. He should have known. I didn’t know then. But I sure as hell do now. I’ll forever look at that summer as the summer I grew up. The summer my perspective on life changed. The summer life went from safe to the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced.

That was the summer I became me.