Pictures That Make You Fall Out of Love

Have you ever had a crush on a cruel guy? You know he's cruel. You know he likes to use the fact that you like him to hurt you? Yet somehow you're okay with that. Well, I wasn't exactly okay with it, but I have always found cruelty easier to forgive than stupidity, so it wasn't hard for me to forgive Toby's brand of cruelty.

Except for this one thing he did.

I was at a Halloween party and I was very excited. I was so excited that I made a complete fool of myself. It backfired quite badly, as Toby took three photographs of me that were not complimentary. Just to make things clear, if someone showed me these pictures today, I would toss them away and snort something about how bored I was. However, teenage me was not thrilled by those pictures, and certainly not thrilled by Toby passing them around at school.

I confronted him and asked him to give me the pictures.

“Sure. Take them,” he said breezily.

I took them and clarified. “And give me the negatives.”

“No.”

“Look, I can see a darkroom from where I'm standing. Giving me these photos means nothing because you can make another set anytime you like. Give me the negatives.”

Again he refused and I handed him back the prints. “You may as well keep these then.” I walked away.

In this lull before the rest of the story, I have to say that I sincerely liked Toby and I had liked him for almost as long as I could remember. He was the whole package. He was very good at school, he played multiple musical instruments well, he was athletic, and had scary good stamina. And I love it when guys do things. At that particular age, I wasn't good at doing things, and I wanted to be part of his world where things happened. His teasing me and letting me down wasn't really a concern. As it was, we had private music lessons together, went to the same ward, and had classes together at school. So, what if he asked every girl in my circle to dance and not me? And so what if every other guy would help me carry my instrument case and not him? Yes, other guys would rush to help me up if I fell on the soccer field and he would just run on. We knew each other well. Saw each other often. And now the rest of the story.

I asked him one more time for the negatives and he said something to me.

I will not say what he said, but it was horrifying.

But it was a window into how he saw me, and it was very insulting. It was him knowing me, seeing my core, knowing what that was, and then explaining that my very human heart was disgusting. A man who could see any woman that way was completely undesirable to me. The fact that it was me he spoke of left me breathless in a way I still can’t explain. Maybe like there was no air in the room. No air in the world. I felt the flower that had been my feelings for him dry up and begin to break. I stumbled away from him back to my desk and felt the stems and leaves curl in on themselves. I stared straight in front of me in a room of noisy teenagers and felt that blossom that had once been so beautiful to me turn to dust and blow away.

Within five minutes, a love I had nurtured for years was completely gone. It simply wasn't in me to love that.