“He died.” I said quietly.

He hadn’t, but that’s what I told the woman who asked what happened to my boyfriend. I was eighteen and had been dumped. He was the first boy I had ever loved, trusted fully and completely with my heart. I’d lived with him and everything and one night, he declared, he did not love me anymore. Just like that. I moved home and I was crushed. Devastated. I did not know how I was going to go on. Sounds dramatic but I was eighteen. That’s what eighteen-year old’s do.

I could not function. I didn’t want to get out of bed, eat, I couldn’t sleep. I needed out of this but how could I get over the hurt? He didn’t want me back and I couldn’t let go of the fact he hurt me after all the things he promised. My parents were getting tired of me moping about. Then the idea came to me.

I started telling myself he’d died. I could mourn his loss, which seemed easier than facing the reality that he’d left me. That he didn’t really love me. So, that is what I did.

He died. Nothing tragic, nothing fantastical. Just dead and gone. From my life. From my heart. It started working. I could get up. I could eat. I could function. While I knew it wasn’t actually true, on some level, to some degree, it was enough for me to get moving again. Life went on.

Eventually, things went back to normal, I met someone else several months later, a year later, I met my ex-husband. Life went back to normal, and this relationship was but a distant memory.

Fast forward a few years – Halloween 2000. I was dressed as a Scarecrow? Or a clown? I cannot quite recall. My year-old cat, Tsarina, was dressed as an angel. I remember because some little kid, who backed up to the door for candy, nearly sat on her and bent her halo. She was a curious kitten and helped me at the door. Her harness had her wings and halo mounted to it, and she spent a good part of the night trying to ‘catch’ her halo. My husband (who was then still my boyfriend) was wrangling our then puppy, not participating in my Happy Halloween antics.

There was a knock at the door and cheerful kids laughing on the other side. I opened it.

There stood three happy kids and my very dead ex-boyfriend from high school.

We looked at one another, both surprised to see the other. Nearly an hour from where we grew up, it was like finding a needle in a haystack.

He called me by my name, I returned the favour. We had the same first name – though with different spellings. My heart was in my throat.

He. Was. Dead.

My head was in a state of chaos. I did not know how to reconcile this. His children (I assumed) wanted candy, and to move on. I wanted to know why a dead man was standing at my door. He wanted to chit-chat. How I was, what I was doing.

Not much had changed for him in the intervening years. He was with the same woman he had left me for (spoiler alert, I found out after he had ‘fallen in love’ with someone else suddenly and instead of telling me, just walked out and told me he didn’t love me). But she’d cheated on him, had a couple of kids outside their relationship, tried to pass them off as his. One of three was probably his. They’d recently moved into our condominium complex. ‘She’ had been a really good friend of mine at one point in time. He worked doing odd jobs here and there.

My life? Well… I’d, as you know, married, and divorced, but I was now in this stable relationship, one dog, one cat, was back in school working toward my interior design diploma… My partner was a successful businessman. I had changed. A lot. I felt accomplished and proud of the person I had become since he’d “died”.

And I realized that I didn’t need him to be dead anymore. The teenage heartbreak, the damage he’d done to me didn’t matter. All the pain he’d caused me wasn’t there. While some of it was an effect of time, much of it was seeing that I was always going to be so much more, but eighteen-year-old me just didn’t have the confidence to see it. Him saying those hard words were the kindest words he could have said to me. He gave me my freedom.