June 27, 2003. 12:48am

I can’t breathe. My stomach is tight and I can’t stop the pounding in my head. I knew he was going away, but all the mental preparation in the world couldn’t have helped what I’m feeling now. I never expected it to hit me this badly. This whole time, I’d been having so much fun. Not thinking about the impending date, even though I joked around about it all the time… pretending to be more upset than I was really feeling. ‘Cause I know that 2 months is not that long. I will see him before school starts, and we’ll pick up where we left off without a doubt. But now he’s really going. And when I think about him not being there when I wake up in the morning… not hearing his sleepy voice on the other end of the line, and him not answering the door when I knock on his bedroom window, and us not having our over-generous morning sleep in….god… that’s just it. Here come the waterworks. Today when we spent the evening together, every little thing he did added on to the lump forming in my stomach. Looking at his sleeping face, soaking in his profile, listening to him laugh, his weird dancing and… that ridiculous smile.
I know we said it would be a good test for us to be apart. I think I’ve learned my first and most important lesson already. I can’t bear to be separated from him. The moment I said goodbye, I felt such a pain inside. It was an honest unplanned pain inside my heart that genuinely told me that I was going to miss him so much. I guess I’m just thankful for this experience because it already makes me realize that I need him around. In my life. All the time. It’s kind of funny how I didn’t really understand that before… I always felt I was strong enough on my own… but now that I’ve let him into my life, I need to have it all.
This is what scared me most about opening myself completely to him, about giving up my heart and trusting him this much. The way that I feel right now….. uuuughhhh…I hope I never go through it again. I can’t bear to think what a breakup would be like. I always knew that he would he would either be my greatest love or my greatest heartache. I’m just wishful and hopeful for the greatest love part…. This is already almost too much to bear.