Page 184 of A Solid Guide to Surviving a Situationship

Red eyes. Wet cheeks. Completely wrecked.

I stared at myself for a few seconds.

Then slowly, with trembling fingers and a breaking heart, I started recording.

“Hi guys!” I said, my voice already breaking.

I let out a small laugh immediately after, embarrassed by how wrecked I sounded, but it only made my tears fall harder.

“Uhm…” I swallowed hard. “I finally did it. I ended things with the guy who broke my heart.”

The words hung there for a second.

Outside the bus window, the city continued passing by in blurred streaks of light and shadow, buildings stretching into each other like memories I could no longer separate properly.

“You guys remember him, right?” I asked, looking straight into the camera now. “The one I keep yapping about. The one who basically destroyed me… Mr.V?”

I smiled weakly.

“Yeah,” I whispered. “We got back together.”

A shaky breath escaped me.

“And now we ended again.”

I looked down briefly, trying to collect myself, but my emotions were already spilling over too fast for me to catch them.

“Because if I stayed, soon enough, he would ruin me—and I… I would be okay with it. and I can’t be okay with it… I just can’t.”

Silence.

“And I think the craziest part is…” I laughed softly again, though there was nothing happy in it. “We never technically broke up because there was never really an us.”

That hurt to admit.

“Like… that’s the thing nobody tells you about situationships,” I continued. “Your heart just doesn’t care that there wasn’t a label. Your heart doesn’t care if it was only three months or six months or whatever amount of time people think should be ‘valid enough’ to hurt over.”

Tears kept streaming down my face.

“When someone becomes part of your everyday life… your routines… your future… your sense of safety… even without a label, losing them still destroys you.” My voice cracked there badly.

The bus rattled softly beneath me as it turned into another street.

“And loving in this generation is so damn hard,” I admitted. “Because they will hold your hand like forever. They’ll call you every day like you’re the one. They’ll sleep beside you. Or tell you things they don’t tell anybody else. Or make you feel chosen.”

I shook my head slowly.

“But when it’s finally time to be sure about you? Suddenly they don’t know what they want anymore.”

I looked away for a moment.

“And maybe that’s why this kind of heartbreak feels humiliating,” I said. “Because I sit here grieving something people don’t even think was real.”

I tried to breathe through the ache in my chest.

“But it was real to me.”

My voice broke completely there.