Choices.

There are those choices that you make. That you think are good for you. You're proud of them. They're small. They're harmless. Until you look back a year later and realize if you would have changed your mind on that ONE little detail, how much heartache you would be saving yourself. How much pain you would never feel. No one person should ever make you feel this way. I feel bad for all the women I judged for being "crazy." It's not their fault. It's the men who make them crazy, then play victim. Scenario: Doing your best to stay away from someone for a year and a half just for you to eventually give in, fall, then get your heartbroken. I never thought I'd meet a man who would fill my head with so many lies, try to get the best of me, tell me how closed off I am, and how he would fly to come see me when we got our new careers. I never thought anyone could be so cruel until it actually happened. Now I'm crazy. Crazy. I'm one of those crazy women that I used to make fun of. You know, I thought he was adorable when I first met him. I have flashbacks of all these moments when I thought he was the sweetest man I've ever met. The moment I first got butterflies in my stomach is permanently embedded in my memory. It was as if he were the most caring, gentle, reserved man. Now looking back, I realize that it was a cover. He was fully capable of breaking someone. I've never been so badly hurt. I remember the night he suddenly rejected me after we made dinner together as if it were a scene tattooed on my hand. I had just met his friends the weekend before. And a few days before that he made me cry as we laid there together on the couch and he told me how I'm the first girl in 10 years in which he has had absolutely no idea how she feels about him. How he didn't want to hurt me.

I can't even be with people now without closing my eyes and seeing him. He has ruined me. That's the problem, though. I remember he used to make me feel insecure when he would talk about how young I am compared to him. Funny thing is, that I've dated men older than him and they never made me feel as juvenile as he did. I hope he gets what he's looking for. At least I'll know better next time. Any woman reading this. Fend for yourself. Don't believe sweet whispers in your ear. Never let your guard down, at least not completely.