My Reality Read Online Free PDF Page A

you think we broke up because of this? Or that?”
    I was desperate for answers or for someone to shine some light and hope my way. I’m sure I drove my friends nuts. But they never let on. Luckily for me, I couldn’t have asked for better friends than Stefani and Reagan. They remained patient throughout it all, listening when I needed to talk and letting me be quiet when I was too sad to say anything.
    My cheerleading friends were also great, but they wanted me to start dating again, no matter how much I said I absolutely was not ready. Soon after the breakup, they tried to introduce me to somerandom guy when we were out one night. I was as polite as I could be. But it made me realize that they didn’t really get how I was feeling just then. I told them AGAIN that they weren’t listening to me, and that I had no desire to date some guy. I know they didn’t intend for me to jump into another relationship; they just wanted me to meet people and be social. I just didn’t even have it in me to pretend to be interested when my heart still completely belonged to Tye.
    Things were not only difficult in my personal life. I was also struggling in my professional life. I was working as a marketing rep for a liquor distribution company. Not necessarily my goal in life, but it paid the bills. I had been a finance and marketing major in college, because I had been told that the business world offered the most job opportunities. I’m not sure what I was expecting to do with my degree beyond that. I honestly think I was just looking for something to keep me afloat until I could find my true calling.
    I remember the first day of work after my breakup with Tye. I actually called the receptionist for help before I went in that morning. She was about my age, and we were friends who shared confidences from time to time. I explained what had happened and asked her to do me a big favor before I could come into the office. I needed her to go into my cubicle and take down all things Tye. Pictures. Notes. Romantic quotes. Basically everything I had used to decorate my cube. I literally sat in my car in the parking lot while she threw away my mementos from the relationship.
    Not that I was capable of doing much work once I finally dared to face my cube. All that week, I would be fine for a little while, and then, I would be consumed with how heartbroken I felt all over again. I remember thinking: I am the most miserable I’ve been in my entire life, and there is nothing that can make me feel better.
    Almost every day at work, I would just randomly start crying. It would happen out of the blue, and there was no stopping my tears. I sat up front at the receptionist’s desk and cried. I hid in the cube that belonged to one of my other work friends and cried. I sat on the floor in my cube, in my work clothes, with my boss sitting in a chair next to me, and cried. The crying didn’t make me feel better. But I couldn’t stop. When I finally did stop, even for a few minutes, it wasn’t long before I was crying again. Now, I’m not usually an overemotional type of person, so this was very uncharacteristic of me. There’s just something about that infinite feeling of hollowness following a breakup that produces far more tears than usual.
    I had felt this way once before, when my relationship with Josh, my boyfriend in high school and college ended. But I think the intensity of those emotions was really a sign of immaturity on my part at that time. When you’re with someone for so long, and you’re so young, you don’t quite know how to handle your emotions when it doesn’t work out. But the difference was that I had gotten over my college heartbreak fairly quickly. I got sad, I got mad, I moved on. But with Tye, I got sad, I got mad, and I could not move on.
    It didn’t help that I was bored and frustrated with my mundane, routine job, which wasn’t giving me any satisfaction. The people I worked with were great, but I’m just not someone