“Listen to me.” Lauren plops down next to me. “I’m gonna be brutally honest here. He’s your first love, so you’re never going to forget him, not really anyway. A part of you will always love him, but not in the way you used to. In the way that you love an old friend you no longer talk to, in the way you love a restaurant that you can’t return to because it closed—it’s an empty kind of love. You’re happy to have experienced it, and maybe you’re sad from time to time that it’s over, but you know it wasn’t meant to last forever.”
