Don’t ever love a girl named Grace.
Don’t ever love a girl named Grace.
She’ll tear apart your whole world, pull the foundations out from underneath you. She’ll break your heart and leave you completely graceless. She’s just a friend, but she’ll be your first love and your first heartbreak all at once.
You’ll learn to love her easily, and though you’re not superstitious you’ll start to think about what it means to have grace in your life. You’ll try not to let it get quasi-religious but you’ll think about how grace is good and loving and beautiful. You’ll thank God for grace.
You’ll get too close too fast, maybe, but every time you ask her if she wants things to change, she’ll say no, that she understands, that it’s fine. You’ll tell her you want to respect her and listen to her, and she’ll say OK. You’ll feel like someone is listening to you for the first time, and so you trust her, maybe more than you should. You’ll let her be the first person you play music for. She won’t understand how much that meant to you.
She’ll be with you through some dark, long nights, and you’ll start to think she might be your saving grace. A saving grace. You like that. It’s cute, it’s funny. You start planning how you’ll stay in touch when she graduates before you. You share a passion project and you imagine the two of you as partners in crime overcoming the odds. You feel safe now that you have someone you can trust. You feel like a lost person who has finally found someone like you out there. You’ll finally feel not alone in a world that just doesn’t understand you. For the first time in a long time, you have a friend. And after a few months, you have a best friend.
It’s Grace.
Then, just when you hand her everything you have, everything shatters. She will break your trust, in secret, simple whispers to people who should never have known. But she won’t tell you what she did. She’ll act like she has no fucking clue while your entire life collapses around you. And you’ll believe her at first, because she’s never lied to you, because she promised she would always tell the truth. And you trust her because you’ve never had your trust violated before. You trust her because they taught you in Catholic school that grace would be with you always, even if you couldn’t see it, and especially in your hardest times. So you close your eyes to the one thousand signs which tell you better.
You keep trusting her. She starts acting weird. You start to feel cursed because grace only avoids the darkest of the damned. You start to think you’re the one who’s messed up, because you see her acting fine around other people. You start to believe — or, maybe you’ve believed all along — that you are a burden, something to be tolerated or ignored, a walking hazard and detriment to society. You’ll try to stop reaching out because you know you’re nothing but an annoyance at best.
You still trust her. You shouldn’t, but you’d agreed over and over that you would always be brutally honest with each other. In hindsight, it was naive and stupid. In the moment, how could you have known?
She comes up with excuses not to answer your texts. You’re inclined to believe them, even though in hindsight you shouldn’t. She’ll tell you that she can’t reply to your texts because of her carpal tunnel. It seems innocuous. But then when you see her again, her carpal tunnel has vanished and she tells you a different story of what happened over the summer. She tells you her parents wanted her to be on her phone less. She tells you she needed to rest. She tells you she was too depressed to handle it. You want to believe her, but you don’t even know what to believe anymore. You want to believe she’s telling the truth, but you don’t know what truth to believe.
You’ll think about how grace is supposed to find you during your hardest times. How grace is always there. You think about how much you need your friends, so you’ll reach out to her. You know something must have gone wrong before and you blame yourself for most of it, because you trust that she wouldn’t be avoiding you unless you’d done something to hurt her.
You agree to talk it out. You tell her you are glad to have a friend who is committed to making the friendship work instead of letting it go.
It seems like she’s trying to convince you not to return to school after your mom’s death. She claims to be trying to help, and of course you believe her. But all along, with every suggestion, you start second-guessing yourself. You don’t realize until much later how much it hurts that she assumes she knows what’s good for you better than you do. You don’t realize until later how she taught you not to trust yourself anymore.
When you finally see her in person again, she won’t meet you in any of your usual places. She wants to meet outside, at night. She tells you she’s on the way to meet a friend, but when you get there she’s wearing pajamas and a coat. You shiver sitting on the cold metal bench, unable to read her face between the angle and the darkness.
You ache emotionally. After a summer that shredded you and culminated in your worst nightmare, you need a way to show the world your pain. You think in images so you try to give her your images, snapshots of the thousand needles that tattoo your story onto unwilling skin.
You give her your images to prove to her how much it hurts. She responds simply with, “You know how unhealthy this is, right?” She tells you to move on. She tells you that holding on to the grief you need is wrong.
By now you’ve learned. You have other people in your life giving you the opposite message. You found someone who for the first time told you they wanted to help hold your brokenness instead of telling you to be strong. For the first time, you start to learn what it means to be loved, and you realize that Grace isn’t it.
You had thought Grace meant love and care.
She tells you it’s obsessive and unhealthy to believe in loving the people around you unconditionally. She doesn’t say it to you straight, but you know that means she doesn’t care about you unconditionally. As an example, she tells you that the person you trust and treasure the most cares about you only conditionally. You try not to believe it, but the seeds of doubt haunt you anyway. You watch everyone you think loves you to see if she’s right.
And yet, you still try. You still try to care and be cared for. You remember all the times she was there, all the memories and the weight of the trust you put in her. You try because you’ve already given so much that you’re afraid to lose it.
And then she’ll disappear. She’ll send a mysterious message to your group chat saying she’s not finishing the semester because of personal matters. You’ll get worried — you pray no one’s died — and you text her the most concerned, most caring text you can think of in the moment: “Hey, are you OK?”
She doesn’t answer for a half hour. You bounce your leg and keep refreshing. You want to be there for her, the way she was for you. You care, that’s your curse.
Finally, a reply.
“Fine.”
Fine.
You feel the friendship die.
Fine.
You flashback to all the nights you told each other that “fine” was just a way of making a socially acceptable lie. You flashback to all the times you’d sworn you’d never lie to each other.
All the images unravel.
All the pieces fall into place and then hit the floor.
You breathe, and it’s over.
Fine.
You know it’s over, but that irrational unconditional care you hold so dear kicks in. And you swear to God you’ll love her, you’ll give her everything you have, but you won’t let it hurt you. For the first time you start to understand how to love without expectation, how to give knowing that she would never give back. You learn how to love knowing fully that you may never be loved in return. You want to do it anyway because you care. You want to do for her everything you wanted her to do for you.
You ask how she is, offer to help.
She doesn’t need anything, she’s fine.
You ask how she’s holding up.
Fine.
At some point, you realize that maybe the best way to care for her is to leave her alone. You can’t shake the feeling that just the act of speaking with you imposes a burden on her. You can’t shake the feeling that she must be happier without you.
She quits your shared passion project, except to undermine you where she still can. You don’t want it to be over but she’s gone. She’s not yours anymore.
And so you watch your first love crumble. You are not so innocent anymore. You feel the ache every time you hear about how grace is all around us, or every time you think about how graceless your life has become. Some days your entire life becomes a metaphor for your broken heart, for all the grace you’ve loved and lost, and the knowledge that the rest of your life is just a string of empty nights, longer or shorter, warmer or colder, but without even a glimpse of grace.
You didn’t used to believe that people had songs they couldn’t listen to because of lost loves, but now you have the same list of songs. And it’s long. You gave her so much that you lost so much.
“These words on a page
Carry the pain
They don’t free it.
In another life, I wouldn’t need to
Console myself as I resign to, release you.”
— Sara Bareilles, 1000 Times
That was the first song you’d ever played for anyone. You’d waited months for the moment, and when it came, you played the perfect song, the song about always coming back, the song about loving forever, no matter how much you are rejected. It’s a fragile song, and it was yours. But now it’s hers. You gave it to her, and although you listen to it sometimes, you know you can never get it back the way it was.
You scroll through your old playlists as if you’re packing a cardboard box of old polaroids and stuffing them under the bed. You’ll find new songs, and better ones maybe, but you’ll miss the old ones. You’ll miss the darkness, the stillness, the feeling of falling when you put your heart over a speaker between the two of you and watched the lights flash across the room.
You swear you’ll never trust another person.
But you still trust too easily.
What is it about humanity that makes us trust over and over again, even after being shattered so many times?
I don’t know, but a part of me prays we never lose it.
