The Second kind of people
There are two kinds of people in this world.
Those who let their first love become a memory.
And those who let it become their entire life.
I belonged to the second kind.
For forty years, I believed I had been born into the wrong universe.
Somewhere, I was certain, another version of me woke beside the man I had loved since college. Somewhere, another version of me had the wedding, the home, the quiet happiness that had slipped through my fingers.
That belief became the only thing I had left.
So I devoted my life to finding a way to reach her.
People think heartbreak lasts for months.
Some say it lasts for years.
Mine lasted a lifetime.
At nineteen, I fell in love with a boy I believed I would grow old with. At twenty-one, he walked away. The world expected me to move on, to heal, to build a new life.
Instead, I spent the next forty years searching for another one.
There is a dangerous kind of hope.
It isn't loud or dramatic. It doesn't arrive with miracles.
It whispers.
It tells you that somewhere, somehow, life unfolded differently-that somewhere another version of you received everything this one lost.
