A Year Long Flight

This is a rough draft for my first Creative Writing:Non-Fiction "essay". I still needs work but I thought to put it up here to maybe get some comments and feedback to help me finalize it.

I was 17 the first time I went to Europe. I had just gotten out of a terrible relationship with a man who liked to treat me as his possession and I felt very confused and lost. For eight months of my life I had fighted to leave this guy and suddenly I was alone. Granted it was what I wanted, but still when someone is given exactly what they wished for they have a moment of panic.

            My panic started as I was packing for my flight. I had to fit enough clothes and toiletries and books to live off of for 3 weeks. I was faced with the reality that in just under 12 hours I was getting on a plane to Germany. I was leaving to a foreign country on my own for the first time. My mum dropped me off at the airport at something like 5:30 in the morning. I can’t quite remember mostly because I was half asleep. I slinked onto the plane and just collapsed into my seat. It was the start of a very long flight and I was still in panic.

            I was alone. There was no one right sitting beside me on the plane and no one to talk to for the whole flight. It was like a horror story, I was stuck on a plane with one book and my endless mind for 10 hours. I was single for the first time in 8 months, and on top of all that I had actually managed to be in a relationship for longer than a month! I was the kind of girl who didn’t believe in herself, so when a guy gave me attention I actually felt important. But soon, after the rush of the start of a relationship, I’d run for the hills making up what ever excuse that I could think of. “I need to concentrate on my school work” or “I think we’d be better as friends”. I was the classic example of “it’s not you, it’s me”. I had insecurities about my self worth and having a boy like me just gave me a feeling of power.

            Tev, my ex, was so different than any guy I had ever met before then. I had started at a new school and he was always there to make me feel included in the group. If all the other students wanted to go out for dinner, he’d call me up immediately and practically beg me to come along. You might even say that he only had eyes for me. I had never felt so amazing before in my life, he treated me much differently than all the other guys before. The day he asked me out, I was in shock. We were walking along the beach by Granville Island, and he just turned to me and said, “Be my girlfriend”.

            There was a problem though. I had a very good friend who happened to be practically in love with him. She had told me this a couple days before and yet here I was with the boy of her dreams and I was the girl he cared about. I looked at him and said “Wait, what? What about Sophia?” He looked so confused.

            “What about Sophia?”

            “She likes you, you moron!” I couldn’t help but smile at his stupidity.

            “WHAT! For how long?”

            “I don’t know for like, as long as she’s known you?”

            We both stared at each other in disbelief. I couldn’t make my decision right away so I handed him my old Gameboy colour with Pokémon yellow in it and told him to play. I needed time to think. Half an hour later I snatched my game out of his hands and said yes. He simply smiled. The smile that he had I swear was angelic.

           

            I woke up an hour into the flight, slightly crying. Our relationship had started out good and then went to hell. Remembering all the good times we had was hard for me, even though I spent so long running it was half hearted. A part of me still wanted to be with him, to hold his hands as we walked along the run-over railway tracks. I wanted to sit on his couch, his dog Tikko at my feet, and have his brother cover his eyes so I could shoot his character in Halo 3. I wanted to go back to the good times, yet an hour into the flight I realized just how twisted our relationship got.

            Now let me make this clear, we never physically hurt each other. It’s mostly that, like I said, I have this tendency to run and he had this tendency to hold on with all his might. I started to run in my small little ways, and he started to try to keep me around in his twisted ways. He played on my jealousy; he started to flirt with other random girls.  He would stay late at our friends house, one time staying with a friend and her three other dance friends. All who were notorious for not being the most pure of teenagers. All that stopped me in my tracks; I could only think that I didn’t deserve that. He cared about me and he wouldn’t intentionally do that to me, I had to do something about it.

            I started to spend more and more time with him. Cooking him dinner, playing him any song he wanted me to play on the piano, and in general just taking care of him. That’s just the way it was. Everything changed when he started to treat his friend from his old town differently.

            Her name was Kisa.

            She was this beautiful little creature, she reminded me so much of a little forest pixie. She was mysterious and earthy, funny and light-hearted, but she really was a pixie in every sense of the world. She was mischievous and I think she saw that our relationship wasn’t going too well. She saw how Tev was trying to hold onto me in these ways, and how I was desperately trying to be someone I’m not for him. She started to weasel her way into his life, sending him care packages with hearts drawn all over the box.

 

            Four and a half hours through the flight, I had to try to shuffle pass the young German man who was sitting next to me to run into the bathroom. I had broken down and was crying uncontrollably in a planes bathroom. I don’t consider myself a weak person, but I know that after Tev and I broke up, I was cracked. Never would I ever find myself crying so violently in a public place as I did that day.

            I made my way back to my seat and settled in, staring mindlessly out the window. I had realized at the end of our relationship that instead of myself being the person he wanted, it was Kisa that he only wanted to be around. Now I don’t blame him, but then I hated him for what he did to me. He made me feel so worthless that I could barely get out of bed by the end of May. I felt like I couldn’t matter to anyone anymore.

            What I say here has been met with some debate. I feel that he did cheat on me, not the physical kind of cheating but the mental kind. He told me the whole eight months that he loved me. That I was the only one he cared for when all the while he was falling head over heels for her. It was so painful, to see someone that you fought against your instincts for just walk away. I don’t doubt now that he cared for me, but at that time it was hard to believe that I ever meant anything to him. Kisa, to me, was a cruel, heartless b***h that I had no respect for. I saw her as a little girl whose only happiness came from stealing the other kids toys at the playground. I was suffering so much from feeling betrayed that I could almost feel all hope for happiness leak out of my pores.

 

            Six hours into the flight, I wanted to murder them. I wanted them to feel so much pain that they could never recover from it. It would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Remembering those feelings utterly terrify me. I was so willing to completely destroy them by spreading rumors about them everywhere I went. I learned this ability from my sister to make anything anyone did, no matter how good, sound completely terrible. I had learned from a young age how to make Mother Teresa look like an AIDS ridden cheap prostitute. I’m not proud of it, but when you can’t just punch someone in the face, sometimes you have to learn how to kill with your tongue.

            My anger didn’t dissipate during the rest of the flight. It defiantly became less and less violent as the last four hours went by but it didn’t really disappear completely for many months after. I remember spending so much time during my stay in Europe just bitching on and on about how unreliable men could be.

            Tev sent me several messages while I was away. I remember waking up in my Aunts small house in Aix-en-Provence to a short message from him telling me how sorry he was for treating me so s****y at the end of our relationship. He talked about how I became just a person to have around to comfort him and about how he was wrong to treat me like I didn’t have feelings. He acknowledged that I was just some comfort for him and that he didn’t take into account that what he was doing was hurting me. He apologized from the bottom of his heart and hoped that I was having a wonderful time and that I was doing ok.

            But the only thing I could say to him was that he was scum and I hated him.

            I regret those words now. We were both young and he had conflicting feelings. On one hand he had fallen for this girl whom he knew for his whole life and on the other hand he didn’t want to face the truth that I wasn’t someone he cared for that much anymore. He spent so much of our time together treating me as if I was her that I became a crutch. He couldn’t be with her because she lived so far way and I was right there. He could hold me in the middle of the night. He could give me a kiss when he felt the need to have someone. He could hold my hand and walk down a street.

            He was just conflicted.

            I can’t blame him for that. I can’t blame him for being young and making bad decisions when I did lots of that during that time as well.

 

            I didn’t heal from that experience for a long time. I spent the beginning of my 12^th grade year being bitter and resentful. I was mean to my closest friends, blaming every mistake they made on their gender. I drove them away because I couldn’t bear the feelings of being close to another man and getting hurt again. I used people to make me happy for a couple days, and then I would drop them for someone else merely because I had lost faith.

            Breakups are always hard. Having someone you cared about being torn from your life in such a painful way leaves scars. I steal deal with those to this day, but I found someone who treated me the way I always wished to be treated.

 

            The winter of 2012 was extremely difficult for me. A good friend of mine suddenly became the guy I was toying with. I had always suffered with depression but it was coming back harder than ever.

            I was done.

            And one night I made everything final. After thinking about how much my relationship with Tev hurt me and about how I couldn’t trust anyone I swallowed 23 sleeping pills and was ready to lull off into a peaceful death. I was in so much pain that I could barely pull the effort together to move to my bed. My best friend who was living in China at that time suddenly logged on to Skype. She called me and I immediately burst into tear. I spent 3 minutes reassuring her that everything was okay, that I was just having a tough time with school and life then quickly excused myself. The toughest decision I ever made was to crawl to my mother and tell her what I had done.

           

            I spent the night in the hospital.

 

            Six days after that event I was playing video games with this new guy I met in my friends class. He kept looking deep into my eyes with this goofy smile on his face. He would wrap me in his arms as I angrily yelled at my TV because of course it was somehow its fault that I couldn’t get past the goblins in that goddamn fort. He would laugh and pull me close, staring deeply into my eyes. It was at that moment that I realized, “s**t, this is how I want to be looked at.”

            It was at that moment as well that he asked me to be his girlfriend and he kissed me. I was an easy answer. Of course I would. I could spend the rest of my life being looked at that way, like I was someone who was totally crazy yet completely faultless.

            Justin completely changed me. When I ran, he would run with me. He would take my fears and turn them into a game to be enjoyed and laughed at. He changed my entire being.

 

            For me, men were always a way to fill a void. It’s not like I was easy, I’ve only ever slept with one man in my life, it’s more that I wanted to feel wanted. I was so wrong in my approach to relationships before Justin.

            He taught me to embrace what another can do for you. He would show me the ways that another can make you feel safe and secure in the middle of the night. He showed me how to live life in a completely different way. Justin has this way of making me feel light and heavy all at the same time. He treats me as if I’m totally insane but completely natural.

            While Tev showed me everything not to do in a relationship, Justin showed me everything to do.

            And maybe thats why, after spending so much time running, I was able to slow down to a walk. A walk that has lasted for two years, and hopefully for many more.

Author's Note

How can I improve this story?
What do you think of the narrative?