I’m not sure what was worse about her leaving me; the fact that all her promises turned into dust and blew away, or the fact that I went from boyfriend to shoulder to cry on. Now that’s not to say she didn’t deserve a shoulder to cry on, but she didn’t have to dump me just before prom and then grind my friend in front of me all night. Maybe if she’d waited a week I’d have been more receptive to that expectation… but most likely not.

I gave her a year and four months of my life, but I’ll be honest when I say that only six of those months were happy, so the break up was pretty much expected. The only reason I’m going to call her by anything anymore is to distinguish one experience from another. From now on, she’ll be known to me as Yellow Butterfly, because that was the most important symbol to her. She was the most recent heartache in my life, but not the worst.

My biggest mistake and my darkest hour happen to be the same person as my proudest achievement and my brightest day. She was my best friend when I gave up on life and myself. She also used all her knowledge of how I work to hurt me more then anyone else ever has. I met her in my eighth grade math course while trying to find a new girl to go out with. I spent two weeks being friendly and talking to her about everything, but when I asked her out, she very bluntly said, “nope”.

After that encounter, I did not speak to her for half a year, until one boring night in July. It was about eight at night and I was on MSN trying to find someone interesting to talk to while simultaneously trying to find some new porn to fap to. I struck up a conversation with her about how shitty my life was, which it was not. She took the bait and gave me her phone number so we could talk ear to ear about the important things in our boring little lives. I spent three and a half months talking to her on the phone, every two days for an hour per night. I became her best friend, and I knew everything about her life and what she thought. She started dating my close friend in mid October and I watched as the relationship fell apart. As she became more and more interested in me, and less and less in him, I used every trick in my bag of spells to make sure she ended up with the right boyfriend. She dumped him just before Christmas, and for roughly two weeks I took a step back and made her come to me.

On what I remember as new years eve, she and I were watching Love Actually while we sat awkwardly leaning on each other waiting for someone to make a move. I finally swallowed my tiny bit of courage and turned to her before leaning in for what was at the same time the most awkward and most intense kissing session in teenage history. We laid there on my couch kissing for roughly three to four hours before she needed to go home. After that night, she became the most important annoyance in my life. I loved her more than I’ve loved anyone since, but she pissed me off just as much. It took us three months before we had sex, then a month before she started doing naughty things to me after school because I was too addicted to her body to wait until the weekend. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say we had sex roughly four hundred and nine times not counting twice a day and blowjobs and other miscellaneous fetishes. I have to say that the first half of high school sure felt good physically, but after two pregnancy scares and a couple of times using sex as a weapon, our relationship had become sex, and maybe feelings, some times.

Near the end of grade ten, once I finally figured out that our relationship had run it’s course and I was too much of a pussy to break up with her, I told my mom I was finally okay with moving. Two weeks after that decision my father’s posting notice came in and I told her I was moving again. I have done things to her that I will never forgive myself for, or forget, and she has told me the same. She is the core of the thoughts that have occupied my mind. She is the last place my heart has felt safe. She is not my first love, nor my last, but she is the most important. And out of respect for her I’ll remember her as Snow Angel…

My first girlfriend was a native girl from the Northbay region who loved to beat on me with every object she could get a hold of. It isn’t like she could really cause any pain but in retrospect I’m glad that I didn’t start wanting to beat women because of that experience. We started dating in grade seven when my parents got posted to Northbay thanks to their military jobs. When we moved I was given the choice of which school I wanted to attend.

My first option was a large middle school with no grades below seven, which had the feel of a cold big city school. My second option was a small school on the outskirts of Northbay in a town called Astorville. It was a grade school that also had grades seven and eight. It had two classes of grades seven and eight, and reminded me of my old school due to the small town atmosphere, so I decided that it was the easy choice. It was an awful school with drug addicts, alcoholics and whores.

In retrospect I would probably have been safer and happier at the bigger school, but I suppose this place really defines me as I am now. It taught me to be as cold as I needed to be, and to cherish love more than anything else. For some reason, all the kids at this school were either hopeless drug addicts or hopeless romantics. I think I’ll call my girlfriend from this period Amber Alert, since she reminds me so much of childhood… and abuse.