She'd heard of it happening - of course she had! Most teenage girls had breakups. Easy ones, hard ones, ones that wrenched out hearts and crushed them with their bare hands. She didn't know why she was so upset about it - they weren't even really together.
Every time she got him out of her head he came gliding back - with that smile, the one that he gave to her with such ease. The enthusiasm he had for everything. The feeling of his hair when she ran her fingers through it. The way he held her.
She always pictured him like that - how they used to be, before all the fighting and the rumours, before he started to ignore her, before she started to question if something was wrong. She pictured the hug they had had, the last one before the start of the end. The warmth, the feeling. No questioning whether or not he was telling her the truth.
She still couldn't believe it, really. Sure, the decline had been slow - she should of let him go 2 years ago, after the first big lapse, the first time he ignored her. She believed his reasons - of course she did. Liking another girl was reasonable. Not telling her about it was reasonable. She didn't even like him like that then anyway.
She should of known over the Christmas holidays, when he only talked to her in person, or after he had seen her, after she had forced him to talk to her, and he promised that he would. Promised with his smile, but not with his eyes. She should of seen it, should of known - but how could she have known? She didn't even know that she loved him at that point.
She should of pushed him away that final weekend, when he kissed her. She shouldn't of kissed him back. They shouldn't of cuddled through the night. She shouldn't of clung to him through the night. She shouldn't of taken his shirt, and worn it every night for the next week.
She should of seen the decline over the next few weeks. The open arrows. The read receipts. The seen notification after each and every grey message box. She didn't think ghosting was possible when you had known someone for so long. She shouldn't of felt so safe in her thought that he'd come back to her.
She shouldn't of felt so bad when she blocked him. She was allowed to get rid of him - she knew firsthand how sad he was making her. She knew her friends were right, she knew he was being shifty, she knew it had gone toxic. She knew she didn't deserve to feel the way he made her feel. She knew he didn't deserve her.
The tears rolled down her cheeks anyway. Any spare moment, any idleness of thought, and the feelings found her. The memories found her. At home, wrapped in her covers, clutching at whatever she could find, desperately trying to drive away the thoughts. In the library, when her mind slipped from the words on the page, or the words on the page were too close to what had been.
She should've known before it had hit her. But she hadn't known until it did.
