My First Heartbreak

disclaimer: the author knows nothing about the makings of love nor the ways in which it emerges. nevertheless, heartbreak quite literally breaks hearts

It was a couple weeks of attending school in Virginia Beach when I started to scan through my mental rolodex of the friends that I had lost. In the halls of my new school, I wordlessly floated from period to period. I hated that the military lifestyle included the process of uprooting and being planted in a completely new environment. Often times, this was against my own will. The feeling of heartbreak became clear to me in the classroom. In the past when I lived in Italy, I was safe, feeling a sense of belonging to those around me. Other military brats alike, all there to spend the next 7 hours absorbing curriculum of adults that had somehow decided to teach overseas. Now I was looking for people just like me – Filipino kids with spiked hairdos or jorts or expensive Nikes.

I had been in an emotional free fall when we left Naples, Italy. I had began feeling the workings of my rebellious nature emerge – a conflict that I would sustain with my father for the remainder of my high school years. He was always away, working to provide for our family. But I was stuck with the issue of having to transition in a new environment. My mother , a quiet figure in my life, offered the very words she had told my brother and sister when they were still home. “You’ll figure this out, you have a lot of experience in moving. You can adapt.”

At Cox High School, I did what I could to avoid any type of conflict. In the halls, I navigated around popular droves of athletes yelling and rough housing the lockers. I sped past the weird and strange couples making out in stairwells. During transition, I looked down and watched my feet move forward when a teacher would stare at me, telling me to “Hurry up!” before missing the bell. In the lunch room, I starved myself, refusing to eat lunch with the fear that the cool table would throw hot dogs and pudding at me – just like they were doing to the kids with learning disabilities. I most certainly did not know how to figure out any of the shit I was going through. I built a distrust in my knew environment, unsure of if I would make it out alive.

Looking back, it wasn’t a particular girl who I had loved and pined for that broke my heart. It wasn’t a friend or a fight with them that made me feel that my heart was in shambles. It was act of leaving home that left me with an unspoken grief, one that didn’t have the time or space to breathe. I hated the military lifestyle, but I loved and missed my friends.

Regret is a funny thing. We’re told to not have any of them or feel it. But leaving Italy had caused for the biggest heartbreak in my life. I was disappointed. I was sad. For years, I had wondered what would have been if I had stayed. I ached for the Italian countryside, the very same one that I had run free without a worry of it changing.