A Letter To My Heartbroken Friend: You Will Love Again

You are sad and you are lost, and I will do anything for you. I will stay up until 3 AM with you while you get drunk on whiskey and contemplate life. I will sit for an hour in the library basement with you in silence, scratching words into the wooden table and listening to someone cough three floors up. I will buy you all your favorite junk food and send you funny videos, although I know none of it will help. You are so innocent, and so heavy-hearted; you cannot even begin to comprehend what love is or what it will ever be, and I wished I could have told you that it would feel like this.

I will talk with you for hours; I will hold you while you cry.

Because dear God I remember how much it hurt, the first time getting your heart broken. I was fourteen and a boy who spoke Spanish and tasted like limes kissed me on New Years Eve and for some reason I thought that was love. And I remember being drunk and losing my virginity at seventeen in a dark hotel room and not knowing how to feel, but knowing for sure that it was not love. And I remember most of all crying while I listened to his voicemails from Afghanistan, a world away, but God I loved him and he broke my heart. I will hold you in my arms while you cry, the way you did when I cried over my dad, and I will tell you it will be okay. And it will be, because we will grow up and grow old together and wither away with time.

I will tell you everything will work out. Ten years from now, I won’t remember the way the lime boy whispered to me in Spanish, or the way I felt when that Indiana boy and I drove down the coast together and he told me he loved me on the open road. I won’t remember hiking in a lightning storm with him or Bob Dylan songs on the radio or biscuits at the late night diner or even that last boy’s cold hands on my back every night in my dorm room. And you will not remember the way she looked past you, or late night piggybacks in the cold, or macaroni and cheese dinner dates. We will not remember that any of this ever happened.

Only the thing is, I am lying, because we will. I will remember all those boys, and you will remember this girl, and it will probably hurt forever, because I don’t think you ever stop caring about the people you once cared about. At least not completely. So I will sit here and I will tell you all this, and try to mend your crippled heart, but I am lying and you will know I am lying and you will still feel broken. But please know that I am here for you, and I will always be here for you, and that it will be alright in the end. You will wake up at midnight one night and remember the way someone held your hand five years ago, or hear a certain song on the radio and think of how your first love played it for you in his car. It will never truly go away. But it will be okay. You have the capacity to look past it and not let it taint your view of how important love can be. You and only you have the capacity to love again. If you can love again (and I know that you will, because you are one of the kindest and most loving people I know), then you will have truly won this battle within, and you will be okay.