NiNETEEN
The nineteen year old(s) that taught me to how to mend a broken heart
Surprise, surprise. Made my own soundtrack for this one. Hope you know Spanish. If not, I’ve got you covered—lyrics at the end with the English translation.
After both of the major breakups in my life, a 19 year old girl has been my reintroduction into romance.
How I’ve treated them has been the biggest test to my growth. In their idealizing, naive hearts—I’ve seen mirrors. The first time I smashed the mirror. The second time I simply rubbed the smudges off and moved on.
The first time I was 23.
Heartbreak was an understatement. I had officially ended things with my on and off again high school sweetheart for the last time.
It was a slow motion breakup. Long distance all throughout college, with the hopes that we’d be able to reunite in one city together afterwards. With her headed to dental school and me staying in the city to work sales at a tech company, that reunion would have to wait. And then the cracks really began to show.
We still held on for another year after graduation, but that final chapter of the relationship was an affront to the beauty of the previous four years. By the end we were drained and bitter, and simply could not continue. I was a shell of myself for a good six months. Then COVID happened, and I found myself back home in Orlando, in my childhood home. Those first couple months of lockdown forced me to really sit with my feelings, not bypass them. Being surrounded by my family, things slowly got easier. Less sleepless night. It was August, and I for the first time found a week go by without thinking of her.
So naturally, I decided to put myself out there again. To test just how over I was her. Of course, I know now this is not how it works.
You don’t use the world to prove things to you about yourself. But I marched forward and used a dating app for the first time. This was back in its golden days, so I remember being overwhelmed with the amount of good matches, good conversations and potential dates. Then I matched with this one girl. She was half Puerto Rican, half Japanese.
A beauty pageant queen studying to become a nurse. Stunning, absolutely stunning. A one of kind beauty. She was a bit dry and playing hard to get, as a lot of girls are at that age but it didn’t matter to me. I became fixated on her. Getting her was going to fix me.
After our first date (dinner and bowling) she started to open up a little bit more...through text. In person she would still be a bit shy, she would laugh at my jokes but was clearly nervous, reluctant to share much about herself. But then I’d drop her off at her home and she would text me until 3 in the morning, and send me long audio messages all day.
On some level inside of me I knew that I didn’t really connect with her. I just found her gorgeous and I wanted to prove to myself that not only was I over my ex, but I could date women just as attractive as her. I kept overlooking the lack of compatibility and treated her completely as a prize to win.
Four dates in I invited her over to my house while my parents were gone for the week. We went to Publix to shop for some picnic supplies, went to the lake near my house and sat on a table and ate, mostly silently. The previous date I had finally kissed her, in a parking garage after watching a movie and walking around downtown holding hands. She had kissed me back awkwardly, then texted me later that she wished she had kissed me more.
That tension still hung in the air.
We made it back to my house and started making out on the couch. A couple hours later we laid in a pool of sweat near each other, her asking me what my favorite parts of her body were. I told her it was hard to choose, as she had a nearly perfect body. She said thank you but she still wanted to know more specifically. I told her her tits and she said she had heard that before. I told her her ass and she said that was a nice compliment because she didn’t really hear that. I was post raging desire and all this talk was annoying me. I was hoping the sex would lead somewhere deeper but the foundation was not there. I was looking for the wrong things, and she was blocked in her own way.
That was until I woke up to a call from her that night, at 2 in the morning. She spilled her heart out, telling me she had always wanted a boyfriend but had yet to date someone seriously yet. That I was the man who took her the most seriously so far, had actually planned dates, talked to her about interesting things. That I listened and seemed interested in anything more than her body.
I could hear her holding back tears as she recounted how all her friends got kissed before her, had lost their virginities before her, how she even had a couple friends her age that were engaged. And all she had was a Pinterest board.
She had lost her virginity the year before to a guy she met when she spent the summer in Puerto Rico. He turned out to be married with a kid. She talked and talked, telling me all her dreams of what a relationship could be and how she couldn’t understand why no one wanted to share that with her.
I told her well she didn’t come across as someone who even really wanted much romance. She was often stoic, and didn’t really open up or yearn. She sniffled and said it was because she was scared. I told her I wish she had told me this before we did anything. It would have made me feel more connected to her to know how she truly felt about all this. She said she was afraid to mess things up.
We met up twice more. This time the talking dynamic flipped—she went on and on about all the ways she compared herself to her friends. We ended both times with car sex. To be honest, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere with her. Most of all, I felt some residual regret over my breakup flaring up. But I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t like her at all.
I did, but her vulnerability was now overwhelming, her questions about me made little sense, and I felt the weight of her expectations. Luckily there was a natural cleaving off point—my company had called us back to the office and I met up with her one last time for coffee as she hugged me with fake tears and asked me when I would be back. I knew it would be Christmas but I told her I didn’t know, that my company might send me around a lot. I promised to stay in touch but after a weekend of texting photos of the city, trailed off.
She texted me again around Christmas asking me if I was in town. I didn’t reply. She texted me again after the new year wishing me a good one. I didn’t reply. She texted me again a week later telling me I was a piece of shit that used her. I didn’t reply. She never texted me again.
The next nineteen year old came to me when I was 27. I had just ended a relationship four months before. This was for sure the best relationship of my life.
Both because my partner was such an exceptional human being, and also because together we nurtured so much personal growth for one another. As a testament to the maturity and healthiness of the connection, we were able to successfully break up without too much heartache, toxicity or messiness.
It was sad of course, but we could see we were outgrowing one another and our romantic connection wasn’t going to work in these new chapters of our lives. We’re still good friends to this day, and she’s one of my closest creative collaborators. So yes, I was in a much better state of mind this time around, with much more experience and self awareness.
I was in Portugal for the summer staying with my parents who had retired to a beach town here. They left for three weeks on their European summer and even my time alone was a reflection of how I was feeling inside.
I didn’t rush anything. I spent the first 10 days enjoying my own company, largely sober, largely at peace. Just working on my art, working out and sitting at the beach being grateful for what had ended. Looking forward and having faith for the future, but mostly enjoying the present.
I met her on the beach.
Her umbrella nearly took my eye out when a strong gust of wind picked it up. She was gorgeous, an Angolan girl with long wavy hair. Her and her friends were tanning in a spot ahead of me, eating sandwiches and drinking beers from a cooler.
She ran over and apologized and I helped her set it back up. They asked me if I wanted a beer and I sat near them for about half an hour as they asked me about the US, and shared music with me. When they found out I was a writer, my girl in question started to ask me about my favorite books.
It was clear she was the only reader in the group, as the rest of them went silent. I figured I would let them have their girls day at the beach, plus I wanted to get back and eat anyways, so I thanked them and excused myself. As I was packing up, she came over and asked me for my number. I sensed her friends giggling as I inputted it and smiled and told her to text me so we could hang out.
This time around, our connection started with a call.
It was midnight thankfully and I was still awake.
She called me and asked me if I was free to talk. I said sure. She asked me right away if I would believe that she had never been in a relationship. It was as if we had been friends for years, the level of intimacy engaged with.
She told me about all the close encounters, all the situationships that never turned into anything more. She even started to cry as she talked about how she wondered if there was anything wrong with her. All her friends were in relationships. She continued to tell me what she thought was wrong with all her friends relationships and then switched up, saying she was glad she was holding out for the right person.
She then waxed on about the ideal love she pictured, the picture perfect lifelong first love between soul mates. She painted me a real beautiful fantasy, one I wanted to believe. In her, I saw myself at 19, the way I thought with my high school sweetheart. It was a real whiplash for me but I had to say, some part of me was curious to explore this psyche more.
So I took her out on a few dates, two in Lisbon: dinner and drinks first. Then pup yoga (she had mentioned she was dying to try it) and lunch.
We had a final one back at the beach where it all started. I had a sunset picnic packed. I brought some flowers (as she had mentioned she had never gotten them) and also my digital camera (she said she wished someone took pictures of her with the same effort she took pictures of others).
At this point we hadn’t kissed at all, at most held hands. And I was totally okay with that. As a matter of fact, the more I got to know her—I liked her but I wasn’t really attracted to her.
I moreso wanted her to have a positive impression of how a man could treat her and also to calm down all her overthinking about what first love could be like. Even though her impression of love was nervous and overzealous——there was something cleansing about hearing it. And I knew that I was healing my younger self as well.
I took her back to my parent’s apartment to drop everything off and call her Uber. We sat in the moonlight by the open terrace as I pulled out my phone to call the Uber and she let her knee rub up against mine.
She asked me if I wanted to kiss her. I looked at her and decided that I did. But that was all I wanted. We kissed for a few minutes and she told me she really liked me.
She didn’t really like me. She liked what I represented.
She hardly knew me. She never asked me any questions, or challenged me on anything.
I smiled and held her hand and told her she was a sweet girl, and that she would find someone special *I was sure of it*. I told her to just keep loving herself. I told her to let go of all these daydreams she had. There was nothing wrong with her other than her overactive introspection. A tear rolled down her cheek and I hugged her as she cried. The Uber arrived and I sent her off, waving as she looked back at me with her pouting face.
I went upstairs and realized she had left the flowers on the kitchen table. I trimmed them and placed them in a vase, telling my mom when she came home that they were for her. I spent the next few weeks taking myself out on dates, and my mother too.
She texted me a week ago asking me to talk. She said that she felt like she handled things wrong and she wanted a second chance. I replied that there was nothing to apologize for. That she did nothing wrong and that it was best this way. For both of us. It really was.
At 22, I broke someone. At 27, I left someone whole.
NiNETEEN LYRICS
Prod. by Quasar Boy
Written and performed by Levi Lopez
INTRO
Que pura, que linda
No le quiero danar, cambiar, marcar
Pero le voy a despertar
CHORUS
Linda de diecinueve
No tiene novio
pero quiere amor grande
No tiene novio
Con miedo y se esconde
Tan inocente
No se atreve
VERSE ONE
Tiene sal en la piel
Sol en su pelo
Miedo en el pecho
Corazon inquieto
Vive en bikini
Pero no se enseña el alma
Idealiza pero no se deja tocar
Mejor se pierde en el mar
Para no pensar
CHORUS
Linda de diecinueve
No tiene novio pero
Quiere amor grande
No tiene novio
Con miedo y se esconde
Tan inocente
No se atreve
VERSE TWO
Hablando con las olas
Tan hermosa
Con dudas
Tan preciosa
Nunca tuvo novio
Solo ideas y fantasias
Quiero serle mia
Tantos suenos
Si se nota
Se pregunta si esta rota
O si todos están ciegos
Que perfecta
Viene del cielo
Tan completa
Pero tiene miedo
CHORUS
Linda de diecinueve
No tiene novio pero
Quiere amor grande
No tiene novio
Con miedo y se esconde
Tan inocente
No se atreve
OUTRO
Mami tu eres diferente
Muy decente
Y caliente
Yo soy paciente
No como esos otros
Esos serpientes
Pero tampoco para siempre
INTRO
So pure, so beautiful
I don’t want to hurt her, change her, mark her
But I’m going to wake her up
CHORUS
Beautiful nineteen-year-old
She doesn’t have a boyfriend
But she wants big love
She doesn’t have a boyfriend
Full of fear, she hides herself
So innocent
She doesn’t dare
VERSE ONE
She has salt on her skin
Sun in her hair
Fear in her chest
Restless heart
She lives in a bikini
But doesn’t show her soul
She idealizes but doesn’t let herself be touched
She’d rather lose herself in the sea
So she doesn’t have to think
CHORUS
Beautiful nineteen-year-old
She doesn’t have a boyfriend
But she wants big love
She doesn’t have a boyfriend
Full of fear, she hides herself
So innocent
She doesn’t dare
VERSE TWO
Speaking with the waves
So gorgeous
With doubts
So precious
She never had a boyfriend
Only ideas and fantasies
I want to make her mine
So many dreams
Yes, you can see it
She wonders if she’s broken
Or if everyone is blind
So perfect
She came from heaven
So complete
But she’s afraid
CHORUS
Beautiful nineteen-year-old
She doesn’t have a boyfriend
But she wants big love
She doesn’t have a boyfriend
Full of fear, she hides herself
So innocent
She doesn’t dare
OUTRO
Baby, you’re different
So dignified
And so hot
I’m patient
Not like those others
Those snakes
But I’m not for forever