All I Have to Say About This.

She sat there, looking at him. So many things were going on inside, but on the outside, she tried to remain blank. Unaffected. She couldn't think when she was looking at him, just feel. And all she felt was sad. You know, the kind of sad when one hears something they were hoping they wouldn't? Made just a little worse by the surprise of it, she just looked at him.  As her heart lay there, at the bottom of her stomach, it felt like it was falling apart. Not viciously, aggressively torn apart,
but as she felt the little, anxious flutter of her heart it felt like her heart was falling away from itself. Just separating itself into tiny pieces, like a completed puzzle falling off a table. Not harsh, or intensely painful, just a sad, disappointed, aching kind of pain.

And he was upset with her? That he was entitled to a "college experience"? Maybe. Maybe he was. When she was looking at him she couldn't think. She could just feel. Maybe he was right. Maybe he was the rational one. But she could only feel, and all she felt was sad.

But he didn't feel sad. That morning, before he told her, he looked good. She commented that he looked happy. He was, he said. He said he was happy because he was figuring things out.
She had no idea. He had written a song about her that morning. He woke her up with a text telling her that. Before he told her he played her a song she said she wanted to hear. He learned it for her.  They talked about love that morning before he told her. She told him he might be the first one she said that to. She didn't feel like that after he told her. They talked for a long time that day before he told her. She thought it was important enough to mention first. He said he did that because he missed her, because she was so far away. She didn't understand.

She felt sad. A little used. She didn't think he felt bad enough. He was happy that morning.  He was going for a run later that day, he said. He was smiling before he told her. He was the one who ended their conversation, because something she said was making him unhappy. She had stopped talking. She sat there, looking at him as blankly as she could. She couldn't talk any more because she didn't want him to see her tears. But when he was gone, she couldn't cry. Just a few, painful tears to wipe out of her eyes. She didn't feel like crying. All she could feel was sad.

It wasn't the usual kind of sad caused by a boy. She'd been hurt by boys before. Yelled at, broken up with, cheated on.   She'd lay on her bed and sob, in intense emotional pain. He'd made her feel like that before, too. That kind of sad was different. She wasn't the angry kind of sad, passionately resolving to never talk to him again, deleting his number out of her phone to try and hold to it. No, that kind of sad was different. It was the dull ache that might never go away. The idea of a girl getting to experience on a whim what she so badly pined for. The idea that her affection could be replaced. The idea of him falling asleep with his arms around her, while she snuggled up to her pillows every night pretending they were him.  The idea of him waking up and her being the first thing he saw. The idea that these were choices he made. That kind of sad is different. Yes, this kind of sad is different.