This is how it starts.

He shyly approaches you with a single white rose and confesses and gives you enough reason to give him a chance.

Looking back, you kind of regret it.

And you should’ve known because everything seemed just a little too perfect.

The two of you aren’t that keen on skinship, pecks on the cheeks and hand-holding here and there and it isn’t until four months into your relationship that you two get your first kiss.

Things are well after that and they include dates (both the occasion and your favorite fruit) and hugs and kisses and white roses every now and then that appear in your locker.

But seven months into the relationship, something just….snapped.

This is how it breaks apart.

He’s been touchy-feely a lot more lately, involving many incidents to want to make out on the couch, but you’re not that type of person and gently push him off if it goes on for more than a minute and fifty seconds.

You can tell he’s slightly annoyed, thinking that it should go just a little further, but you take time to go that distance.

It rains on the day of your first argument with him.

It wasn’t really a break-up, but you willingly took him back when eight white roses show up in your locker with a note that says, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

And you do. Naturally.

But this is how it ends.

It’s the one-year anniversary and maybe you’re just a little too giddy for such an event and you shouldn’t because dark clouds are looming over the city in what the forecast informs as a 90% chance of thunderstorms, but when you open his apartment door with the spare he had given you nine months in, all the lights are off and provocative sounds are coming from his room.

Your heart pounds in your ribcage and you don’t want this to be true, but the crack of his open door lets you see that this whole year has been a lie because he’s currently ing into a girl, who’s face you cannot see.

Tears build up in your eyes, but you fight it as you take all the 27 pictures outside his room that include you and leave the frames empty. But there’s a notepad on the counter, and you quickly grab a piece and shakily write,"It’s over." and slide it into an empty frame. You know he’ll see it.

You leave like you’ve never been in there and slide the spare key in through the crack under the door once you’ve locked the door silently.

Your eyes catch a streak of lightning from the window positioned above the stairs that take you out of the building and the second you step out, it rains.

It doesn’t matter. Rain has always been your best friend, but you hate how it can be so cliche at times, always there when something bad happens.

At this point, you can care less at the fact that you’ll catch hypothermia at the rate because you hate being played with in any situation, games, relationships, jobs, pets, whatever.

You don’t know how you made it home or even when you made it there, but you don’t bother to strip out of your drenched clothes and crash on the couch in a state of exhaustion.

———-

When you wake up, the cushions on the couch are wet and the dizziness tells you that yes, you’ve caught a really bad cold.

It’s still raining like a hurricane outside, but you drag yourself up to take a hot shower without collapsing and come out to see your phone lighting up, indicating missed alerts.

There’s thirteen voicemails, fifty-one missed calls, and seventy-two text messages all from the same person and you press the “clear” soft-key because you’ll never go back to him.

You call your best friend and tell him your condition and he arrives at your apartment in five minutes since he lives just below you in the apartment and takes out a box of Swanson chicken broth to warm up for you to drink since you’re sick and chicken soup is proven to help during colds.

He knows what happened since your ex phoned him and he knew you wouldn’t break up with the douche bag unless it was for a legitimate reason. And having with another girl was definitely one.

He sits next to you on the blanket covered couch and puts an arm around your shoulders even though there’s a good chance he’ll get sick after this and watches you slowly drink the broth he warmed up.

The blinds are open on the window in front of you and the two of you watch the rain in silence.