First Love, First Dead

When I met him, I wasn’t expecting anything from life anymore. I was planning to leave everything behind and move to Japan. I was looking at apartments, imagining my future there, convincing myself that the silence of a new continent would fix everything I didn’t want to face. My heart felt numb, and for the first time in a long time, I thought I knew where I was heading.

Then, at my farewell party, crowded and loud, I saw him.

And the moment I saw his face, something inside me froze with a strange, sharp familiarity. It wasn’t attraction. It was recognition — the kind you feel in your bones before your mind understands what’s happening. I remembered a dream I had. A feeling I couldn’t explain. And the first thought that crossed my mind was frighteningly clear: “This man will be my biggest lesson. My deepest wound. My longest story.”

Up until then, none of my relationships had lasted not even a year or so. I never imagined I would spend four years loving someone more with each passing day. I didn’t know that he would become the beginning and the end of a version of me.

In the first six months, neither of us acted like someone falling into a real relationship. I stayed detached, he stayed detached. We pretended the gravity between us wasn’t real. But then he had to leave for Ireland for six months, and long-distance exposed every crack in us. I had never been in a serious relationship before, and the fear of losing him made me lie, not to hurt him but because I felt like I was constantly stepping on fragile ground. I didn’t know how to communicate vulnerability; all I knew was chaos.

When he came back, guilt began to eat me alive. I overcorrected. I became obedient, predictable, desperate to fix everything. And he, with his narcissistic tendencies, used that dynamic without even realizing it.

Yet even then, even at his worst, I never doubted that he loved me in his own way.
What I doubted was his humanity.

After two years, we decided to live together. The apartment was beautiful, luxurious, a place where two people should have grown into something stable. Instead, inside that perfect home, I fell into one of the deepest depressions of my life. For days, sometimes a week, I didn’t shower, didn’t leave the bed, barely spoke. My body felt like it was made of stone. And the man who could easily carry me from the bed to the bathroom, who watched me rot without lifting a hand — that part still sits somewhere in my chest like a cold weight. Another 2 years passed like this.

But the breaking point came later.

It was New Year’s Eve, 2024 going into 2025. His parents were visiting. We had another argument — one of those arguments that start small but carry the weight of everything unspoken between two people. I broke a mug between my hand during the fight, and a shard cut through the vein in my finger. There was blood everywhere — the floor, my hands, the bathroom, the hallway. I was shaking, dizzy, scared. And the only thing he cared about was the mess. Not my turned black finger, not my pain, not the fact that I could barely stand with disappointment filled in my blood. He screamed because his parents were coming and the house wasn’t perfect.

That was the moment something fundamental inside me broke. I realized that if I dropped dead right there, he would still complain about the floor.

Koyun can derdinde, kasap et misali.

After that night, things shifted permanently. We fought again a week later. I had no job, no savings because of him, nowhere to go because of me, and he looked at me with a coldness I will never forget and said, “Maybe the problem is you. Maybe everything happening to you is because of you.”

He wasn’t just talking about our relationship.
He meant every bad thing in my life.
My struggles.
My depression.
My fears.
My losses.
My entire identity.

My MOM. Her tortures...the bitch that I hide her under the soil of my subconscious.

He placed every hardship on me and walked away clean.

That sentence woke me up.

I looked at him and told him that one day he would watch me on television, that I would be so successful he would regret the night he spoke to me like I was a burden he needed to get rid of. He was scared of this because between his fucking sociopathic level of intelligence, he knew in his bones that I would be who I say I will be and he wont have any financial support from me anymore, or a love.

I packed my things. I stood at the door. I was still sorry cuz he was in tears and animalistic anger. And I asked the universe for a sign.

The clock read 22:22.
The temperature was 22 degrees.
The date was 02.02.
Everything mirrored itself like a cosmic push.

So I left.

After the breakup, he apologized maybe everyday under the window of my apartment. He left me flowers daily, morning and night. He asked me to marry him with a big ring and bigger proposal. But I could see through the panic — it wasn’t a proposal born from love, but from fear and control. He was using the ring as a tool not a purpose. So I didn’t accept. The heaviness of rejecting maybe the only chance of having a family in this life, since I was born, was denied in the same lips are mine. He couldn’t handle the separation, so he left the country, and I left myself for a while. I traveled few places in the world for months, found silence, learned to breathe again.

Before he left, we spent one last night together. We weren’t a couple anymore, but that night felt like a ghost of our old selves. The next morning, he opened his eyes and immediately started crying. He knew it was the last time he would ever wake up next to me. Our most sacred thing was to sleep in each others arms, now it was gone forever.

I will never be able to sleep in someones arms again, thats a drama speaking maybe, or maybe reality of the last few months that I wasnt able to sleep still.

And even after everything he did, I never doubted that he loved me.
But I doubted the kind of man he was.

Sometimes I wonder if I turned him into that person,
or if he was always that person and I simply stayed long enough to see it clearly.

We carry a tattos of each other in our bodies, still with a promise to remove it if we ever fell in love again..

Ti amo sempre Amore mio, at least the part of us that I remember as...