Second Fiancé

I'm gonna use different names to kind of create anonymity in my writing. But I guess I'm struggling with some things and I think the only way I can really feel better is to write things down, and maybe there is other people here who can relate, who can feel with me, or maybe I'll just seem a little crazy. Who knows.

My first love was with Micheal. Micheal and I were together for 5 years, he was everything fun, everything bright, everything silly, everything loud, and everything that a young love captures you by. The adrenaline behind it all, the fact that my family didn't care for him that everything was pick me up late and we'll drive down by the water together, smoke on the beach, be reckless, and be in love. Just the two of us. He became my best friend, my number one supporter, and I think that when someone is your first love and it just encompasses you in such a strong way, that those feelings will never really leave you. Micheal and I ended things mutually, I think the sparks died. Like a flame flickering, dancing with such beauty, but bound to go out. I think I'll always love Micheal, but I don't think that Micheal is my person, my husband, and that's okay really. It hurt incredibly, learning to live life without him next to me. I told him I'd always love him, and he told me he would always love me, and we will forever wish the best for one another through anything life throws at us in our separate directions, but the compatibility was no longer there. A hard lesson I've learned is that it's very important to be happy on your own. When that person becomes your sole reason to be happy, that's when things get really scary, when the idea of waking up alone completely paralyzes you. What I think now is that the only thing I'm looking for is a compliment to my life, for someone who makes my life better and who adds to my own happiness, but isn't my reason for being happy.

I'll never regret the time I shared with Micheal. I'm so grateful for the beautiful memories we shared together, for every adventure, for the way he swept me off my feet and gave me my most beautiful first love story.

When I met Jackson everything changed. He caught me by complete surprise. I never believed in love at first sight, and I still don't think I do. But I think it can become love at first sight if you allow the time spent together to develop into love at first sight, if that makes sense. The second I saw him I knew I wanted everything with him, I saw everything with him. He was so different, but in every way I truly admired. I had told myself to take things slow with him, but when I saw him for the first time and he had smiled at me, I had never wanted to truly taste someones smile so badly. I had never wanted to be so close to anyone in the way I felt about Jackson, and when he kissed me that very first time, in the middle of the night in front of the water alone, I felt goosebumps dance over every inch of my skin. Like I had truly loved him, and he had truly loved me, and I think that's what I mean by love at first sight. Things never really stopped after that, every kiss, every gesture couldn't really be described as just butterflies, but more like a radiance of moths, since moths never really go away.

We moved in together, we have a beautiful dog together, and it was an unspoken but very much understood feeling that we were gonna spend the rest of our lives together. My family adores him, he is my perfect companion, my best friend, and we are both so grateful for our powerful love story, and the way that we continuously capture one another.

Jacksons past is quite different from mine. Jackson was also very much in love before he met me, as I'm sure most people are at our ages. He had been in love with a girl, and had already moved in with her, had two dogs together, and was with her for 8 years. He had proposed to her, for he was very much in love and had wanted to marry her. One day, he came home from work early in an effort to surprise her, when he caught her fucking another man in their bed together. I can't imagine his pain, or the cosmic darkness he felt in that moment that had generated so much pain and grief, for it truly tore him apart.

And then he met me. I was his next girl.

No matter how much you think you know someone, I don't think you can ever truly know how they're precisely feeling. You can try and step into their shoes, but you can't step into their mind. Into that caving shadow of depression, of wondering why you weren't good enough, of being so completely blindsided, I think those are his unique and personal thoughts that you can understand, but you cannot comprehend because you didn't live it. You didn't live every happy memory, or sad memory, and you weren't in that relationship, it was his. They will forever be behind a concrete fortification of his own personal feelings and memories, which is completely okay.

Sometimes I feel hurt by it because of how it affects me, which is entirely selfish. I know it is. But sometimes I feel like just the next girl. I feel like the next girl he got a house with. The next girl he got a dog with. The next girl he will get down on one knee for. Ever since I've been a little girl I have always dreamed of finding my prince charming and getting married, and sometimes I feel like those thoughts are a bit tainted because the person I'm choosing to do my life with has already done it before. I wouldn't call it jealousy, because it's really not. It's more like it just isn't...special to me. Like my proposal is comparable to looking into a foggy midst of deja vu, it's already been done. It's very hard to put it into words. It just hurts. It hurts that he has already got down on one knee for someone else, I mean who the fuck wants to be the second fiancé.

Sometimes it's hard for me to envision my future with him without separating our future from our pasts. With Micheal, everything was very young and fun. I remember there was this time we went to an arcade together and he had used the little tickets he had to buy me a ring made out of blue and orange string, and he told me that it would be mine until one day he could get me a real one, but we never made it there. It was a young love. Jacksons love seemed like it was on a much bigger adult sized scale to me. I guess that scares me, or hurts me, I'm not sure really.

Please know that I understand, I understand that I'm upset about a time where the two of us never even knew the other existed, and how unfair that is. That's why it's hard for me to talk about it, so I just thought I would write it down instead.

I think what I keep with me is that our love, second as it may be, is ours. It's our story. It's our opportunity to make a beautiful life together, and that opportunity may have never presented itself to us, if I had not been the second fiancé.