K—, whose Dad didn't want to learn my name because we'd break up eventually.

K—, who would pretend to cheat on me with T— for laughs, and leave me voicemails full of panting.

L—, who'd break up with me three times a week, and kept me enslaved to my phone.

L—, who cheated on me the first night I worked at summer camp. It'd been the longest we'd been away from each other.

T—, who gave me a sad, knowing look the night she agreed to be my girlfriend.

T—, whose ex tried to stab me with a knife. They're back together.

M—, whose first boyfriend dumped her after the first time they had sex, and kept begging for it from me.

M—, who kept hitting me when I said we would wait.

J—, whose Mom kidnapped her and brought her to New Zealand. She never saw her Dad again.

J—, whose Mom became a prostitute to pay for their apartment.

J—, telling me about the sores, the scabs, the oozing—down there.

J—, who wasn't made to live long. She made sure of that.

N—, who could die at any moment from a heart condition.

N—, who would couldn't feel anything unless it hurt.

N—, who laid in my bed, and when I wasn't around, laid in my roommate's.

S—, raped by her last boyfriend.

S—, at the hospital, because she stabbed her leg with gardening shears.

S—, describing her last boyfriend's penis with something like love.

And me. What the hell is wrong with me?

[tw - suicidal thoughts]

There are things you don't understand about love when you're fifteen.

Love is a choice, and I knew that, and that is why I never told her yes. But what were labels across a thousand miles of ocean? When she was someone I knew through the poetic river of words that spilled from her chapped lips, she was easy to love. I knew the important things: the shampoo she used, what posters she had on her walls, and her endless encouragement toward all of my projects that were doomed to fail.

But then she loved me. And that shouldn't have changed anything. We weren't any different than we had been before. I couldn't kiss her through the screen of my phone. I wasn't even sure if that was what I wanted.

They say that everyone struggles, everyone deals with negative things. Somehow, I seem to have the spectacular talent of attracting people who need more than I can give. People whose memories have been replaced with stop-motion violence and darkness, asking me to run the film of happier times that I could not define.

She was one of those, one of the ones who fought every day just to make it to the next. Some days she would text me so I could calm her down. Once she drank a glow-stick and laughed it off, but she said it was because she wanted to die. One day I was trying to talk her off her metaphorical ledge but she was in too deep, and I just dug myself in beside her. She disappeared to class and I had never been so scared, crying in my first period study hall because the only person I loved was going to die and I couldn't stop her. I went to the internet, because I knew what to do there, and I contacted her school.

We had never had such a violent fight.

I regretted nothing.

Things changed. We couldn't talk as often. I was busy, I said. My busy was sitting up late in my room night after night, trying to figure out myself. When summer began and the messages stopped, I wasn't surprised. Sad, yes. Lonely, yes. But not surprised that my inability to care for another human had driven someone away.

As it turned it, I'd done nothing she saw as wrong. Instead, she was in the hospital. She listed what they were concerned about, but all I remember was the fear that she could have died and I would never have known.

When September came, she had a girlfriend.

It was the first time I realized that her loving me did not make her good for me, and my loving her didn't make her a good person. I didn't get my post-breakup tears and ice cream and ranting with my best friends, because I had relied on her. And it turned out that you needed a lot more than romantic love to make your way in life.

And besides, it's hard to miss something that was never really there.