I am not the type of girl to write love stories. I am the girl who sits in her room reading comics and slaving over fan fiction. My experience with dating is chalked up to a series of embarrassments; getting ditched at prom, saying the wrong thing, falling for the “rebels” who cannot tell the difference between “you” and “you’re.” I am not lucky in love. I am neither blessed with the kiss of romance nor can I proclaim to be anything more than I am; a girl. I do not possess any special qualities that set me apart from the other females my age. I am not excessively beautiful. I do not have the rack of Stacy’s mom. My personality does not distinguish me as unique. I am not eloquent; I merely get my point across. In summary, I am the quintessential definition of average. But sometimes, extraordinary events happen to extra ordinary people, and, often times, the people affected are too blinded to notice them. My miracle came in the form of heartbreak.

Whenever I break up with someone, society tells me cliché lies to help me cope. People throw on their concerned voice and say “He didn’t deserve you honey,” or “It’s probably for the best,” and my personal favorite “There are plenty of fish in the sea.” Sure, they are nice gestures, but there’s always that nagging fear deep within me that screams that all the fish in my “vast ocean” will happen to be five cats. Breaking up is like someone telling me to enjoy watching my grandma cry; like being told to watch those ASPCA commercials without dishing out all the cash in my wallet; like being told to chew on tin foil without wincing. Unless it was a known fact that I really hated grandmas and animals and loved tin foil as a midday snack, one can probably understand that breaking up, for me at least, is not fun; one person always gets hurt, friendships are lost, and any further contact with the ex either leads to awkward hookups or awkward contempt.

Breakups in a summary: I invest my time in someone, I steadily grow fonder of them, I become close, I begin to trust them, and then that person dumps me on my ass for some chick with a bigger bra size and looser leg joints. It sucks, trust me. Naturally though, I am not saying that all relationships end badly, just most.

His name was Benson; awkward name, awkward boy. But at the time, I thought he was the bee’s knees. Everyone else around me just thought that he was a bumbling Chewbacca impressionist. He walked like a yeti with a stick up its pants. He enjoyed the musical genius of Nickelback and Hollywood Undead. He smoked all sorts of fancy plants I had never heard of, and I knew by his Nu Metal tastes that he was a total bad boy, which attracted me to him. I believed that the power of love could change him. That was my downfall. I had heard the Huey Lewis ballad and thought that if it could work for Marty McFly, it could work for me.

It did not work for me though. I became an archetype of female dating history. My life played out like every high school movie ever: girl sees boy, girl starts to like boy, boy hears of girl’s affections, boy tells girl everything she wants to hear, boy sleeps with girl, boy promises forever, girl believes boy, girl falls harder for boy, boy leaves girl, girl cries and falls into the arms of ice cream and “Sleepless in Seattle.”

During the relationship, I spent eight months collecting excruciatingly uncomfortable moments. I neglected my family. I lied. I slipped into bad habits. I skipped school. I became a foreign person to myself and those around me. The night that text came in telling me “we” could not be fixed, my heart shattered to pieces and at the same time, turned to stone. I literally became sick to my stomach.

The peculiar thing is how when I fall out of love with a person, I can be so irritated by their quirks, so tired of their company, so convinced that there’s something brighter out there waiting for me; But then the prospect of the end is presented, and suddenly, I only see the good in them. I count all the memories; every smile brought on by stupid moments, every time we laid in each other’s arms and gazed into the stars, every word that made me fall for them, every lingering kiss that still burns on my lips, every emotion that I experienced, every “I love you”, every fight, every time we made up, every essence of their being. When I breakup, all those feelings flood me, and I can try to fight back and cry them out and convince myself that I never loved at all, but the emotions will still be there. I was in love. I am not denying that, but it was only my first test and I failed horribly.

The healing process is long. It takes a while to trust again. And, of course, one person usually does something stupid and confusing like drunk dial the ex in an attempt to hookup one last time. The ex will contemplate this offer, but eventually both people come to realize that rekindling a relationship is like eating eggs cooked in a microwave. They usually are just no good.

Sure enough, I realized that failed relationships are not the end of the world. Friends told me the cliché lies; Dashboard Confessional told me that real love was out there, Facebook pictures told me Benson had let himself go; little wins like this got me through the day. Although I could not acknowledge it before now, my breakup was a miracle in disguise, in many ways. I learned to rekindle with my family. I threw away all of our mementos and moved onto loving myself. The experience forged a stronger person out of me. I am not the kind of girl to write love stories, they are just not realistic. So, I wrote a breakup story.