Before the Rabbit Hole

We started dating in seventh grade.

Which feels almost ridiculous to say now because seventh grade love is supposed to be something you laugh about later. Something that lasts three weeks, ends over a rumor, and becomes a name you barely remember.

But we lasted until eleventh grade.

Four years is a long time when you are that young. Long enough to grow up beside someone. Long enough for them to know different versions of you before you even realize you are becoming different people.

He played baseball.

I played softball.

He was social in a way I never was. He had friends everywhere. He could walk into a room and know somebody, or leave knowing somebody. I was still my shy self, always a little quieter, always watching before speaking.

Somehow, it worked.

His parents liked me. I liked being around them. Their house felt different from mine. Not perfect, because no house is, but calmer. Safer. Like I did not have to study everyone’s face before deciding what version of myself I was allowed to be that day.

He had seen my mom be the way she was more times than I can count.

He saw the yelling. The moods. The things that were normal in my house but probably did not look normal from the outside.

He never made me explain it.

Every time something happened, he would start a game with me.

Something stupid. Something small. Anything to pull my mind away from whatever was happening around us.

I do not remember every game now, but I remember what it felt like.

He was trying to give me somewhere else to go without actually leaving.

At the time, I do not think I understood how kind that was.

When you grow up around chaos, kindness can feel ordinary if it is quiet enough. You do not always recognize it while it is happening. Sometimes you only understand it years later, when you are sitting with every person you lost and finally realizing which ones were actually good to you.

He was good to me.

And I hurt him.

That is one of the harder truths to admit because there are so many stories where I was the one being hurt. So many people who lied to me, used me, scared me, broke something in me, then acted like I was crazy for bleeding.

But this is not one of those stories.

This is the story of someone good who loved me before I knew what to do with love.

I was raped while we were together.

I did not tell him.

I did not tell anyone.

I carried it by myself for months, even though I did not really know how to carry it. I just kept moving like nothing had happened. I went to school. I played softball. I talked to people. I smiled when I was supposed to.

But something had happened.

Something inside me had changed, even if nobody else could see it.

Months later, I ended up in a mental hospital.

By then I was feeling so many things that I could not separate one feeling from another. Fear, shame, anger, confusion, sadness. They were all tangled together until I could not tell what belonged to what.

And after that, I broke up with him.

From the outside, it probably looked like I made a decision.

Maybe it looked like I stopped loving him.

Maybe it looked like I wanted something else.

The truth is, I did not understand what was happening inside me. I did not know how to explain that something had been taken from me and I no longer felt like the same person.

He thought I was leaving him.

I did not know how to explain that I had already left myself.

Before all of that, though, there was Galveston.

We told our parents we were going to the water park.

We did not go to the water park.

We drove to Galveston instead.

It was reckless and stupid and exactly the kind of thing that becomes magical when you are young enough to believe one secret day can belong only to you.

I remember the feeling more than the details.

The road.

The excitement of knowing we were somewhere we were not supposed to be.

The ocean waiting at the end of it.

For one day, we were not children living inside our parents’ rules or whatever was happening at home. We were not thinking about consequences or the future or how everything might eventually fall apart.

We were just us.

I do not know if it was his favorite memory.

But it was mine.

In my mind, Galveston became the last place where my life still looked like the life I thought I was going to have.

Before the hospital.

Before the rabbit hole.

Before drugs and running and surviving and becoming a person who could leave people before they had the chance to leave me.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if none of it had happened.

If I had told someone.

If I had gotten help before I disappeared inside myself.

If I had not pushed away one of the few people who had already seen the worst parts of my world and still tried to make me laugh.

I picture a life that probably never existed exactly the way I imagine it.

Baseball games.

Softball games.

A house that stayed ours.

Parents who liked me.

Growing up beside someone instead of constantly starting over with strangers.

Maybe we would not have lasted forever.

Most first loves do not.

Maybe we would have broken up eventually for normal reasons. Maybe we would have wanted different things. Maybe we would have become different people.

But I wish I had gotten the chance to find out.

Instead, everything after him became louder.

More dangerous.

More temporary.

For years, I thought the people who caused the most damage were the ones I loved the most. I confused intensity with love because intensity was familiar. I understood chaos. I understood fear. I understood trying to earn affection from people who made me prove myself over and over again.

What I did not understand was someone trying to distract me from pain without asking for anything in return.

I know now.

I know now that he was one of the good people.

I also know that I was not evil for hurting him.

I was hurt.

That does not erase what I did, but it explains the girl who did it.

She was carrying something she did not have words for. She was scared, ashamed, and changing in ways she could not understand. She did not know how to ask for help, so she started cutting pieces of her old life away.

He was one of those pieces.

Maybe that is why this story still hurts.

Because he was not just my first love.

He was the last person connected to the version of me that still believed life would happen in the normal order.

School.

Sports.

Love.

Growing up.

A future that did not feel like something I had to fight my way into.

Sometimes I think he was not the love of my life.

He was the life I might have had.

And maybe that is worse.

Because when I think of him, I do not only miss a person.

I miss the girl I was beside him.

The shy girl who played softball.

The girl his parents liked.

The girl who could be pulled out of a bad night by a stupid little game.

The girl who drove to Galveston when she was supposed to be at a water park and thought one stolen day by the ocean might last forever.

It did not.

But sometimes, when I think about that drive, it still feels like there was a version of us who never came home.