One thousand words later, my keyboard was soaked in tears as I finished writing out the details of How Chris and I Broke Up. He’d sent a “Dear Jane” letter from boot camp to tell me that he was proposing to someone else. As an 18-year-old with severe depression, I was already having trouble coping with my first year of college. Now, the person to whom I’d lost my virginity was dumping me via a hastily scrawled letter.
We’d previously broken up after high school graduation, when he said he was enlisting. I didn’t think a long-distance relationship would work. During the few months between that emotional night and his departure for Texas, he’d hooked up with a girl named Shasta, like the soda. On my birthday, she called me to demand that I “stay away from her man.” I later learned that she was hitting him.
Just before he left for boot camp, he called and said he wanted us to get back together. We’d make it work, we agreed. And so we began a letter-writing campaign that shifted from adorable professions of love to the one that I stared at in shock as I read the name of his intended.
Shasta.
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