Some time after high school, when one of the very few long term relationships I’d had ended, I learned that apparently I had many crushes that I never knew about or was too shy to follow through with and that I was the cute guy on the block (I was the fat guy throughout school and always thought of as a brother). The attention I got from these girls was addicting. Also, the pain I was still healing with from my previous relationship made me both bitter and lonely. I used girls who had feelings for me. I would go back multiple times and reopen the wounds I had left just to satisfy my urges. The self hate from these encounters and then avoiding the girls afterwards drove me to 2 years of alcoholism and very, very bad decisions. I won’t go into all of them… just the one that has been bothering me for a long time.

The one relationship that haunts me the most is with Rach. She was slightly younger than me and extremely easy. I’d been with easy girls before. But this was a very desperate kind of easy. I was h**** and trying to find out who I was after an abusive relationship. So we started talking and hanging out. I could instantly tell that something was off with this girl. She always so easily first turned to s** when we talked and her thoughts and likes, ideas… everything was dependent upon other people. I don’t think many would have called her pretty, but for some reason to me she was beautiful. She lived from place to place, relationship to relationship, offering s** just to have company or starting relationship so she had someone to feed her and keep her phone on. Her mother was a terrible drug addict and lived off the system. Spending time with her pushed a pit in my stomach and made me ashamed of myself.

We only had s** once and my head kept me from finishing. After that, I avoided her as much as I could, until finally I had to block her number and her social media to escape the desperate pleas for company. After growing and maturing, I see there was nothing I could’ve really done to help her. But the things I did didn’t make things better at all. This is the only thing I think I would ever take back from my life if I could.