The Loop Begins Here
A journal at fifteen, on repetition, self-editing, and the moment love started to feel like adjustment.
Author’s Note
The following journal entry is reproduced exactly as it was written in February 2003, with slight modifications to preserve names and clarify context. I was fifteen and trying to make sense of distance, silence, and the version of love I believed I had earned.
At the time, I thought I was documenting a boy’s aloofness and my need for reassurance. What I was actually circling was repetition. I wrote about feeling stuck, about life looping in predictable ways, about needing to change everything about myself to move forward. I did not yet understand how quickly that instinct would migrate into love. When something feels unbearable, I look inward. I assume I am the variable that must adjust.
Reading it now, what stands out is not his distraction, but my reflex. I soften what hurts. I translate impact into misunderstanding. I question my reaction before I question his behavior. The silence did not begin with him. The habit of bending was already rehearsed.
I am leaving this entry intact because it captures the moment before I understood how loops form. The pattern is visible, but she does not yet see it. She thinks she is trying to move on to the next stage of life. She is stepping into one she will repeat.
My Journal
February 2003, Age 15
I don’t like school. It seems too fake. Their conversations bore me; the challenges presented are mundane. The repetitive schedule, the same thing happening every day, is nauseatingly exhausting. I hate this part of life. Realizing how things rarely change. Like I’m stuck in a loop. Maybe this is why I feel like I need to change. Like I’m the problem in this equation. I want to change everything about myself: my appearance, my way of thinking, my way of reacting. I just want to move on to the next stage of life.
And I hate how I must wait days to see Vincent. It just seems stupid. I wish I could see him every day at school again, even if it’s just a little while, so I know what it would be like. It’s weird to think we used to go to school together. But then again, it’s too hard to think about what that was like for me. What he did to me. Sometimes I just have to forget any of that ever happened to me.
I’m entering one of those dream states again. I must be. I feel kind of empty all the time, like none of this is real. And all I want to do is read a fantasy story of falling in love during the Renaissance because sometimes being in love in real life is far too painful. I have selective tastes in genres, I know.
Vincent has been aloof again. Always that back and forth. I can’t make him tell me what’s wrong. It’s probably nothing, right? But he doesn’t reassure me that it’s not, so how am I supposed to know? His inability to provide any insight or clarity about his feelings leaves me panicking that it’s something negative about me or us.
Vincent, it scares me. I just want reassurance from you. But I don’t feel like I’m getting what I’m looking for in you. I don’t think you even know how to give it to me. I don’t think you know enough about how to handle a situation like this.
It’s complicated.
And haven’t we already realized that I make big deals out of nothing? But only when I feel like whatever it is matters. And this matters.
I don’t want either of us to be mad at each other. We’ve been through so much. This anger sucks, and it’s not necessary. But when I’m sitting here desperately looking for comfort from you, some answer, condolence, some validation that this matters to you too, and you deflect, going on about how you’re frustrated because you can’t find a song on my computer, it’s like I’m not important enough for your attention.
Maybe you’ve heard enough of me, and you don’t understand why I can’t just let it go, just forget about it. But I don’t understand how you can just move on. We both lack patience.
Maybe someday, I can make you understand.
Postscript
There is nothing dramatic about this entry. No overt betrayal, though it was already taking root, no explosion, though they would come. Here it is only a girl on the floor asking for reassurance while a boy she cannot stop loving spins in a chair, distracted, already pulling away in ways she cannot yet articulate, and that quiet asymmetry is enough to begin shaping her.
It looks small, but it is not small. This is the kind of moment that alters a life without announcing itself, the kind that teaches a young body what love feels like, what distance signals, and who must adjust in order to keep the bond intact.
