It might sound crazy but it ain't no lie

So, I did as every other high school graduate I knew did and went away to college. Brian and I had now been together for eight months, and leaving didn't sound at all awesome. I don't know why I chose to move out to the midwest in pursuit of higher education. In retrospect, I think it had a lot to do with the fact that my school of choice had a cool purple website and I'd met one (1) person who at the time I thought was awesome (oh lord, clearly first impressions really aren't my strongest suit) while on a visit there. Brian and I spent one last night together, although I wouldn't let him sleep over since I had to get up so early to leave the next day, so we just laid on my downstairs couch for a few hours talking and crying. Saying goodbye to him was pretty awful. I remember that we stood out by his car in front of my house for a long time, and I remember too that that was the first time I ever saw Brian shed a tear. It was late August and hot as hell, and his hat was covering his eyes since he was staring at his feet, but I still saw it and it was jarring. I guess in most of my relationships, romantic and otherwise, it's always been hard for me to glean exactly how much of my other's behavior is real and how much of it is pulled from romantic comedy scripts. But it's very hard to fake what I saw in him that night.
I left early the next morning with my parents in our Ford Focus. We drove all day and stayed the night somewhere, and the next day we drove to the town where my school was and stayed the night in a crappy hotel on the outskirts. We took a short walk that night around the town that I'd call home for the next ten months, and at the time it looked so pleasant. It looked like somewhere I'd want to live. It amazes me the way the look of a place can change so much without actually changing at all. The anonymous town became something completely else over the year that followed. It's colors changed entirely and it almost seems that all the angles were erased and re-built at some point while I was living there, too. It's hard to explain.

I wish I didn't have to shut him out completely now to live my life. I wish that we could be friends. I really do. It just doesn't work that way, I guess. I have to really consider my definition of a friend, and what can and can't be allowed. I won't be called fat and ugly by a friend- but what if they take it back? I can't be friends with someone who is totally preoccupied with reassuming his position as my boyfriend. That just won't work. As long as he's using this hopeful kind of language ("I want to treat you so much better than I did" and "see, if I hadn't said those hurtful things to you, we'd be together right now") I simply can't talk to him. It's like I just told him; he's pulling apart a wound that I've been trying to heal for the past twelve days. My mom told me last time we broke up that my primary concern has to be preserving myself, so that's what I need to do. As much as it hurts to hear him sounding so hopeful, and hear him being so unhappy without me, I have to focus on how much it hurt being with him and never getting what I needed and deserved. He showed up at my school today, with a huge bouquet of flowers, waiting outside my morning class. I just had to keep telling myself that he was there for the wrong reason, that he's just trying to avoid his pain by pulling me back, and I had to stick to my resolve.

This fucking sucks. Seriously, it sucks.