It's strange, you know, stepping into the past for a while. My heart hurts a bit, yet it is filled with the reassurance that he chose me and nothing else matters.
Mike had to clean out his bedroom at his dad's old house and found a box of notes from high school and a stack of letters and two journals from right before we met. Maybe it was wrong of me, but I couldn't help myself and I did have his blessing. I just had to peek into the minds of these women who came before me.
The high school ones weren't so bad. They were the typical "first love" infatuation and clinginess. In some I got a glimpse of what her life was like and that her home life really wasn't that great. It explained a lot about why she latched on to Mike as strongly as she did back then and also a lot of why she had such destructive behavior in their relationship. She didn't really have a model in her life to follow. I kind of feel sorry for her and I have definitely moved beyond the thinking that she was nothing more than a psycho freak. Realistically she was your typical high school girl in her first serious relationship and not so different from myself at that age (although my boyfriend was the clingy one in our relationship).
I was more selective with what I read from his other correspondences since that was much more personal. He had been dating a girl who was a year ahead of me in high school when we met. I read through letters from the month Mike was still dating her when we first met. I could tell they were having problems before I came into the picture. It was nice to read that I didn't steal him away from her as had been depicted to me by a (former) mutual friend. I had been told that they had been talking marriage before I came into the picture and in all honesty, it sounds like Mike had mentioned it in conversation and she hadn't been interested. She sounded shocked that he would even be thinking like that since it wasn't really on her mind yet and they were both still in college.
There were a few from after he had broken up with her and we started dating and as silly as it seems, I think those bother me the most. She tried so hard to get him to go back to her. She even told him lies about me that were alluded to in the letters, but spoken to him in person. I guess I have a hard time understanding how someone I knew through band in high school who I never really hung out with outside of school and who I never spoke to about my personal life could tell Mike that she knew me and we were friends and "there's more but I have to tell you in person." Of course I know now that she was just trying to make me look bad, but she told him I was a slut and I can't help but wonder if she came up with that on her own or if there was actually something going around about me like that. It baffles me because that couldn't be farther from the truth.
Perhaps I'm empathetic to a fault, but reading those letters gave me an insight into a person with very high walls who was very vulnerable inside. A person who didn't realize the amazing man she had in her life until he had moved on to someone new. A person who really was never right for him anyway, but who still acted so desperately to try to hold on to him. I can still remember writing a letter to Mike explaining to him that her seemingly innocent requests "as a friend" were really just ways she was trying to work her way back into his heart and if that's what he wanted to tell me now because I wasn't about to be strung along while they played games.
Obviously things ended in my favor, but I sometimes wonder how things could have worked differently to allow me to keep the friend that I lost through everything. Certainly she wasn't as close a friend as I had thought if she would choose sides rather than stay neutral when two of her friends liked the same guy. Regardless of the circumstances it still hurts to lose a friend.
July 1st is the 14th anniversary of our first date. I know none of this stuff matters anymore. He loves me and we have a wonderful family together and we were meant to be. Yet somehow my heart still hurts a bit when I think about the events that took place that summer and the lives that were changed because of it.
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