Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul III by Jack Canfield

Author:Jack Canfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul

A Difficult Lesson

Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are those . . . it might have been.

John Greenleaf Whittier

It was August 1984, Kalamazoo, Michigan, Western Michigan University. The temperature was in the mid-eighties, the sun was shining and it was my first day of college. And, as if all this weren’t enough, it was also the day I met Cindy.

She was stunningly beautiful. The type of beauty that turned heads. Casual attire and sparse amounts of makeup reflected her confident and self-assured persona. No need to flaunt her beauty.

Cindy and I met under precarious terms on this special day. While riding up in the elevator, she gave me a smile, which I returned. We got off on the same floor, which shocked me into insinuating that she must have been mistaken. Boys and girls on the same floor? In college? I shrugged it off, still not believing. As I stood outside my room, waiting for my brother’s arrival with a load of my stuff, Cindy walked down the hall directly toward me. As she approached me, the butterflies began to stir in my stomach. Outwardly I tried to be cool, confident and funny. I calmly said with a wide grin, “I am not waiting for you.” Cindy shot back with “You’re a jerk” and entered her dorm room key into the very next door. I could not believe the most beautiful girl in the whole dorm lived on the other side of my wall. So much for me having a clue.

I was able to overcome my less-than-desirable first impression and we began to date. By mid-November we were an inseparable pair. We were in love. For me, this type of love was a first. We had many things in common. We were both outgoing, fun seeking and shared the same musical tastes. We shared close to a year-and-a-half of wonderful but tumultuous times. Being in love brought forth many different emotions from within me, the majority of which were positive. Some however were negative. Negative emotions I had never dealt with, like jealousy, the most powerful of those emotions.

Cindy and I broke up, for good, in February of 1986. I had allowed jealousy to consume, smother and destroy my first love. When I last saw Cindy, the only emotion I shared with her was anger. My anger compelled me to present to her a full envelope of pictures of good times we shared together. Pictures that, in anger, I had torn into thousands of little pieces. I did not keep one single picture. Cindy opened the envelope and saw the pictures. The last words she spoke to me were the same as the first: “You’re a jerk.” This time she was right. The last words I spoke to her I will live with forever. I looked her in the eyes, with passion no longer of the loving kind, and said, “I don’t care if I ever see you or hear from you again.” And I walked away.

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