The months after were spent healing, and at some point, I was enjoying life again. I was still working out, but I had a new goal, which was to get in shape for the summer, as I would be traveling and visiting the beach. Life started looking up for me again. Around April, things would change. My friend who I planned on visiting and staying with introduced me to someone. Although I wouldn’t have the chance to meet her until much later. I started talking to her, just to see how things would go. And they went well. Rather well, I should say. This girl enjoyed dark humor, liked horror, and was quite sick in the head. Literally. Like, mentally ill sick in the head. But hey, grippy sock means grippy box, right?
Well, here’s the problem. She doesn’t want anything physical. Fair enough, I thought. I had no problem with that in the early stages of our budding relationship. However, a complication arrived in the form of an old flame, so to speak. A girl who loved me ever since high school. Take note, this was around 7 years, give or take since our last interaction. To avoid confusion, I will now introduce the concept of names. Celeste refers to the first character in this lovely tale, the one who broke my heart and started it all. Ivy refers to the one who picked up the pieces, and unfortunately allowed me to realize that I’m poisonous. Just like her. Finally, we have Nora, the sad side character who fell for the person I was long ago, who will soon realize that I’m not the same person I was when we last met. Now that I’ve cleared that up, allow me to continue.
Ivy was great, no really, she was. I would look forward to staying up late talking to her, whether it’s about her dysfunctional family, her pets, her weird classmates, and our common interests. No matter what, I truly enjoyed talking to her. So if all this was going great, what’s the problem, you might ask?
Remember the friend who introduced me to Ivy? He brought up the idea of me going to meet with Nora since I was going to be close enough to visit her. What started as asking for a hangout between two friends who had not seen each other in a while quickly turned into jokingly asking her on a date. I was being coy about it, but it still made her shut down, or at least do an error 404. After some pressing about whether I was serious about inviting her on a date or not, (which, for the sake of keeping up the “joke,” I was serious) she accepted.
Great, now there are two candidates for my heart, right? Look at me, I’m all popular. No, that wasn’t it. Although I truly had feelings for Ivy (at least, that’s what I thought), I didn’t want to hurt Nora. It got to the point where I was at a bar one night, asking people what they thought the difference between “seeing someone” and “dating someone” was. The reason I asked that was because I knew there was a chance that both Nora and Ivy would be at the same place at the same time, and I wouldn’t want either of them to get the wrong idea. After all, I wasn’t even in a relationship with either of them. The truth was, I enjoyed the attention. But I certainly didn’t enjoy it enough to disregard any future consequences. After all, nothing was sure yet. I hadn’t even gone on my first date with either of them.
~Frank, April 3, 2025
A Person Who Exists 
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