Crazy, Stupid, Love (Mostly Stupid)

I live on social media. I check facebook, instagram, snapchat, whatever, every 5 minutes. My phone sends me push notifications for everything so I know if someone has messaged me but even then I can’t help it. I crave attention. That’s like 90% of the reason I do this. ANYWAY my point was this: today when I fired up my phone 0.3 seconds after I woke up, Facebook decided to be it’s lovely self and throw a memory my way: a picture of me and my first girlfriend Amanda from 4 years ago. I know what you’re thinking and yes, first implies more than one. Anyway I was 16 years old and always kind of awkward and shy so I had never had a girlfriend or kissed a girl or anything of the sort. Now I’m still awkward and shy so I’m glad all my problems have been fixed.
At my school there was this theatre trip every year called ISTA where about 10-15 students would rush off the some other international school and do theatre type shit. You’d be split off to go be with other schools so you’d make friends across the globe or something I don’t really know, but there was a grand purpose I’m sure. In my sophomore year of high school (second, tenth grade, third to last year) we went to Turkey, which was cool cos this was before all the Turkish president saying “Dutch people are Nazis” shit, for now he was just thinking it. One person on this trip was Amanda. Now at the time I was hopeless and thought girls were just hot but this chick defined my type. Shorter than me, brunette, latina, nice ass, good sense of humour, smart but not too smart; it was spooky.
I guess more than anything she actually showed interest in me, which never happened before. So for this week I chased after her, doing my best Ted Mosby impression, with expected results. But I thought I was actually getting somewhere, and she was responding so maybe I was. At the end of the week I was gonna ask her out and you could tell she knew it was coming. So at the airport she looked all sad and she gathered us around and she was like “I’ve been lying to all of you” and I was like aw fuck here we go she’s a guy, not again. But then she explained that she had a boyfriend and she felt bad cos she’d been flirting with me (I just heard “flirting with me” and came a little) and felt like she’d deceived all of us. Talking more with her it came out that it was a long distance relationship with some fuck boy so I wasn’t really stressed because even then I knew the nice guy always wins (hahahahahahaha).
So I settled in for the long wait. She knew how I felt about her and she didn’t run away screaming so I kind of took that as a sign she felt the same way. About 3 months after knowing her and talking to her every day she broke up with Fuck Boy and ran into my arms oh wait noooo cos that’d be easy. She ran off to Brazil for the summer (cos she was Brazilian, not to find herself or something), and we still talked every day, skyped, all the good shit. Eventually in September (we met in March) she dropped the bomb and asked if I wanted to be her boyfriend. I was like fuck yeah and thus began a rite of passage I honestly would’ve rather avoided.
Now as I said she was my first girlfriend and my first kiss. This was before #metoo but I was still hella scared of fucking it up by making unrequested advances. So my brilliant solution? Do literally nothing. After about 3 weeks of this Amanda got pretty pissed and started wondering if I was ever gonna kiss her, which to me was a sign that maybe she wanted me to make a move. As far as first kisses go it wasn’t the worst, it wasn’t the best, but it had me fucking hooked. From that first kiss on I was in some horrible world where everything she did was perfect. And I was horny as all hell, which added to the whole rose tinted glasses issue. Basically it was just a mess. But for about 7 months we were a happy, gross couple, literally impossible to hang out with because of dangerous amounts of personal displays of affection.
We watched movies, listened to music, went to school dances, posted shit on each other’s walls like “I love you” and “Miss you” and happy birthday posts (I was actually the worst person). Towards the end of the year it caame out her dad had taken a job in Brazil and she’d be moving back there during the summer. I was fucking devastated because I was losing my one true love. However always the optimist I thought her leaving late in the summer meant that the summer leading up to it would be full of making out and spending time together. Now an important point about Amanda is that she used Tumblr, a fact I never wasted an opportunity to tease her about. She wanted me to get a tumblr too and made me a deal: if I reposted or whatever 1000 posts on my own tumblr, she would give me the password to hers. That seemed like a fair deal so off I went to repost some crap and after a few days I’d done 1000 and she gave me her password. Cool I guess, good sign of trust. I never actually used it because why the fuck do I care?
Now we were both in the play at the end of the year, I was acting because I can’t stay away from the spotlight and she was doing tech because… I do not know. She was also doing tech with her friend who was a year ahead of me, two years ahead of her, we’ll call him Egor because that’s his fucking name. Now I wasn’t a stud in high school, I had glasses, braces, my hair was fucked but still I wasn’t the ugliest of the lot, but Amanda was still out of my league in that time. She was with me same as any girlfriend I’ve had since then: cos I’m funny and they’re too good for me so they have that security. So she and Egor started spending more and more time together as he showed her the tech ropes or whatever, and I was getting a little worried, but she assured me they were just friends and I loved her so I was like nah we good.
June 10th, 2014 (yes I remember the date I know I’m sad) my dad took me to the final of the women’s field hockey world cup, it was holland against someone I don’t remember the game weirdly enough. She was spending the day with Egor, but we made plans to spend the next day together as it was one of the final days of school. That night when I got home from the game, she was acting super weird and not seeming very talkative which seemed pretty suspicious to me, Sherlock Holmes. So embracaing my new identity I was like, she’s 16 years old what are the odds she has different passwords for everything? So I logged into her facebook at 2 am and checked her messages because I am insane and hella paranoid. And lo and behold what do I see but her talking to Egor way after she told me she was heading off. So she was lying to me and avoiding me well if my spidey sense wasn’t already tingling it was making siren noises now. I opened her chat with Egor and scroll up a bit where I see them talking about their day… and their first kiss.
I dunno if you’ve ever discovered your first girlfriend was cheating on you at 2 am after a day at a women’s hockey game but there’s no feeling quite like it, except maybe discovering your first girlfriend was cheating on you at 2 am after a day at a men’s hockey game. Anyway it fucked me up, I called her immediately, woke her up, just to tell her that I read her facebook messages and shockingly we were breaking up. Next day she comes into school and is all sad and takes my two friends, Lauren and Alena, aside and tells them to take care of me (which Alena took way too literally and Lauren has not done) and just like that she was out of my life. Sort of. But that’s a story for another time.