It wasn’t supposed to be love.

I’d read about love so many times, watched it happen for my friends, my family. I’d never been in love. Ninth grade, 14 years old, and I didn’t have the slightest clue what love was. I’d had boyfriends, guys to kiss, to call, to swear I loved. I didn’t.

I met him by accident. A friend had told me about him. The friend was my ex-boyfriend, and I thought that I was crazy about him, but of course he wasn’t interested anymore. So when I first heard about Cody, I didn’t care.

“Hey, so my cousin thinks you’re hot,” Sean said.

“Um.. ok,” I replied. Hot? I had never been called hot. Pretty, cute, beautiful, but never hot. I didn’t pay him any more mind, though, I had never even seen Cody. So I forgot about him, for a moment.

It was only two days before he started IMing me.

“I’m Cody, Sean’s cousin.” He started.

“Oh… hi. I’m Kate.” It started so simply, just a couple sentences. He was strangely charming, in a trying-too-hard kind of way. It was cute. He flirted with me in that first conversation, and the flirting only continued. So we went to the movies, seeing each other for the very first time. From there, it just went on.

Beautiful. Gorgeous. Perfect. Brilliant. He always had something nice, and heart melting to say.

“Anything for you,” he always said. “Anything,”

Then he asked me out. I panicked, and I didn’t know what to do, but in the end it wasn’t me who decided. My parents shut it down. Cody was 18, after all. We still flirted, we still liked each other, and we didn’t stop seeing each other. We just worked harder for it. It was perfect. It was also ruined in one conversation.

“Was it wrong that I had a fallback girl?” He asked. Yes, yes! My mind screamed yes. Another girl, lined up after me? I started crying, what was going on? I’d never been hurt like this, not by a boy. I thought I was special! He liked her.

I avoided him, meeting his icy blue eyes only once in the next few days. He kept texting me, begging for forgiveness, taking it all back. I let him. But I was a fool back then…

Cody and I dated, but it became more and more strained. We weren’t officially going out, and the monogamy was always doubted. Did he still like her?

Everything changed when summer came.


Cody had enlisted in the army.


I knew that. I knew when I started seeing him that this day would come, but I didn’t know how much my heart would shatter. The day he went to Basic Training, I was about to board a plane to Utah. He might not come home to me. I called him, frantically worrying that I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye. He told me to calm down, that he loved me. “Anything for you,” I began to cry, sobbing in the middle of an airport.

“I love you.” I said, the first time that I ever meant it. He was gone.


Cody would come back, and we’d try to make it work again. But the thing about the army is that it changes people. It changed me too. We couldn’t be in love anymore, he wasn’t the person I was in love with. He got a new girlfriend, and I a new boyfriend. We stopped talking.




I was cleaning out my dresser when I found a letter he wrote me from Basic. I read it, and kneeling on my floor, I cried. I lost that person, the person that he used to be. I couldn’t stand who he was after the army, but the Cody that I met, that I fought for? I will always love him.


Some people you’re just not meant to forget.