Each person you love can teach you something. If you look from the right angle, that person teaches you about you. The person you love is a mirror.

Sometimes – often – you meet people in life for a time, and then you let go. This is a natural cycle we should celebrate. Grieve the loss. Be grateful for the person you got to love for a time.

This is the way it was for me and M: mutual muses who parted ways, more or less, after a little while. At the time, nine months felt like forever. I was eighteen and he was twenty-four. In love for the first time, I was trying to figure out how to jumpstart the life of my dreams. M helped me realize the possibilities life can offer, especially if you know where to look.

M and I met on Myspace in late 2007. I messaged him first, and then we started talking, and talking, and talking...then over email, then over Skype...

Falling in love for the first time – really really for the first time – shaped me. This person, M, he changed me. I breathed in every word he spoke. His dreams became real to me, his music was in all my playlists. I took in everything that this person could offer me, every teeny tiny drop of love that he could offer me.

I always knew it would end, but I didn’t know how it could or why it would.

I was young, and so naive. For years I kept him close, like a tragic heartbroken secret. M always felt like this totally unreal person to me, even though we met and touched and sparkled together in person once or twice.

I didn’t know yet that a lover can’t fix you. Love is not a magic wand that, once under its spell, makes all of life’s problems disappear. You are still a beautifully flawed person, even when you’re in love. Especially when you’re in love.

After this relationship, I entered another and another and another where I kept searching for someone to fix the aches and pains in my heart. If we could just cook enough pancakes, throw on enough records, make enough love, then it would all be better. Life would be easy.

Love is a healer, but only when you finally learn to love yourself.