You let him walk into your life when you wrote your number on the palm of his sweaty hand. You didn’t give him the chance to break your heart, and you didn’t let him tamper with your smile. You didn’t give him the chance to take you out, or meet your friends. You walked down the hallways clinging onto your nearest friends arm and rushed to get to class early because your mind lingered on all the possible ways you’d hurt him.

All at once it began. Good morning and goodnight text messages, exchanges of hopes and dreams, four o’clock conversations, crumpled up letters, and an arm to hold on to until you arrived at your next class. You talked about family, fears…Grey's Anatomy. He was there for you when you didn’t know you needed him to, and when you didn’t want him to be. Then conversations turned to paragraphs. Suddenly, you were a rambler and utterly indecisive. Your mind constantly still lingers on all the ways you hurt him. The ways your eyes forgot the color of his, the way your heart wrinkled into a knot, and the way he said you killed him when he realized he could never make you happy and would never be the reason for your smile.

“I want to talk about what happened without mentioning how much it hurt. There has to be a way. To care for the wounds without reopening them. To name the pain without inviting it back.”

But you never did give him the chance to break your heart. Your goodnight and good morning messages turned into a seven digit number that you’re no longer familiar with. Now you lay down on your back staring up at your phone wishing that you still had a friend. That you could still ramble on about how you have no idea what this is and where it’s going, and that he would still patiently sit there waiting for your hesitant fingers to collect and convey the words in your mind into a well worded 500 character text message. Because you learned that it doesn’t matter where it’s going, as long as you enjoy whatever you have now. That it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, as long as you’re happy, and that you need to stop second guessing everything. That you need to start taking more breaths between your thoughts and stop slow dancing across each possible outcome. That you need to forgive yourself for being present half-heartedly, and hiding behind fear, to accept the fact that you didn’t let him break your heart because you did it all on your own.