He killed my butterflies

I met a boy. I fell for him, hard. Everything about him was just perfect, from his looks even down to his name. I know how trivial it sounds to say a boy had the perfect name but you can’t tell me you’ve never imagined the name your perfect partner has. Anyway, the second I layed eyes on him that night of my 23rd birthday I immediately got butterflies in my stomach. The second he touched me I got even more butterflies. The second he kissed me, it heightened. You get the point. When I made my friend wing-woman me that night, he was supposed to be a naughty birthday one nightstand. I fucked around and fell for him too quickly; literally that same night. All of a sudden he consumed my thoughts daily and I felt unlike myself until the weekend came and I got to see him again and spend the whole weekend with him. It was my first time falling that hard for anyone.

Weeks and months went by and every single day I spent with him was literally a perfect day. Even when he touched me for the 1000th time I still got butterflies. It wasn’t long before we both professed our love for one another. I think the thing that made it so perfect was that it was just effortless. It wasn’t like any other relationship I’d been in before where I had to be someone else or be something I’m not or even try so hard to please him. I was enough for him and he made sure I knew that. Which of course meant he was enough for me. I’m not kidding you when I tell you that the world stopped spinning and nothing else mattered.

The fact is, I chose to ignore the simple truth that nothing is perfect. Of course nothing is perfect. I wasn’t. He wasn’t. We weren’t. None of those “perfect days” were perfect.

One happy afternoon, I noticed something on his laptop, without meaning to. There was a girl with whom he was messaging back and forth. I didn’t understand any of the messages because, if I haven’t already mentioned, he was foreign. All I was drawn to were the many love hearts buried in the messages. I didn’t confront him about it because I chose to live in blissful ignorance. But later that day I brought up the subject of his home country and any friends he’d left there and whether or not he’d stayed in touch with any of them. He blew up and somehow worked out that I had seen what I had seen. But that wasn’t the deal breaker. He reassured me that it was absolutely nothing meaningful and that it was his childhood friend who has also been someone he’d been in a serious relationship with for a couple of years in the past.

A few more weeks went on as I continued to live in blissful ignorance. Until one day he told me he had booked a holiday to go back to his home country to spent a couple of weeks with some friends. I just knew in that moment I was about to have my heart broken. Because I couldn’t bear to lose my perfect boy, I let him do what he pleased and I just prayed and hoped he would do the right thing. He went on his holiday and I waited back home very impatiently for him to come back. When he did, I had just one question to ask him. He answered “yes”. In that moment, I felt every single one of the butterflies he had given me just fall lifeless. Every single one of them. Just like that, they were all dead. He ruined my perfect days, my perfect relationship. He killed my butterflies.

Over two years later, no one, not even he, knows the hurt I have carried with me all this time. I get to watch him treat some other girl how I never got treated while I try to find a relationship even remotely as perfect as the one we had. Then again, maybe I had the perfect relationship; I can’t speak for him.

He killed my butterflies.