My First Heartbreak

It wasn’t the kind of heartbreak you read about in teenage novels.
There was no boy. No stolen kiss.
No love letters tucked beneath my pillow.

My first heartbreak came too soon,
before I had the words for grief,
before I understood that people don’t live forever.

I was only a child when my nana died,
old enough to remember her laugh,
but too young to understand where she went.

I remember calling her after school,
talking about my day,
asking for help with homework,
and how she always had time to listen,
no matter what she was doing.

I remember Christmases at her house,
the smell of roast filling every room
the sound of laughter
and “War Is Over” playing on repeat.
That song still makes me think of her.

I remember her picking me up from school when I was sick,
pouring me a glass of flat lemonade, her home remedy for a tummy ache,
and letting me curl up on the couch in front of the TV.
I remember the home brand vanilla wafers she’d buy for us
and how excited we’d get when we saw the packet on the bench.

Those little moments,
the phone calls, the songs, the small acts of care,
were the heartbeat of my childhood.
And then one day, they were gone.

I didn’t know then how quickly things could change.
How one moment you’re laughing in a kitchen that smells like roast and vanilla wafers,
and the next, you’re standing at the edge of something you can’t yet name,
something that will change everything.

I still see her that day at the tennis courts.
My family sat watching my tennis match from their deck chairs,
and through the mesh of the fence,
I caught sight of her walking away,
bent over, her hand on a tree,
trying to steady herself as she vomited.
I didn’t understand it then,
but that moment became etched in my memory,
the first terrifying sign that something was wrong.

Not long after, we found out she had pancreatic cancer.
She went in for surgery,
but when they opened her up,
the cancer had already wrapped itself around an artery.
There was nothing they could remove.
Nothing they could do.
We just had to watch her fade,
slowly, until there was nothing left for the illness to take.

I remember her taste in jewellery,
the big, bold earrings she always wore.
They were so heavy that they’d stretched her earlobes into slits,
but she wore them anyway.
They were her signature, loud, unapologetic, full of life.

I remember her love for dogs too,
and the puppy she got not long before she passed.
I can imagine the comfort that little soul must have brought her
as she navigated her illness.

I remember the day my parents took me to her house to say goodbye.
Her body sat still in her chair.
She was pale, bones and skin.
The sickness had taken everything from her,
draining the colour, the warmth, the life.
She was cold.
And she was gone.

When she died, I didn’t just lose my Nana.
I lost my best friend,
my homework helper,
my tennis supporter,
the one who always showed up.
And I watched my family break in ways I didn’t yet understand.

My dad and his brothers, broken, silent, angry.
Grief pulled them apart instead of bringing them closer.
And as a child, I learned something dangerous,
that love can cause pain.
That loving deeply can destroy you.

And because my parents were hurting too,
they didn’t know how to help us understand ours.
So the cycle continued.
We all learned to carry it quietly.
To drink it down,
push it down,
laugh it off.

No one taught me how to grieve,
so I learned to hide it.
To smile through it.
To stay busy.
To become strong, independent, unbreakable,
because if I didn’t rely on anyone,
maybe I couldn’t lose them.

Maybe you’ve done that too,
built your own kind of armour,
not because you didn’t care,
but because caring felt dangerous.

One night, so intoxicated and broken,
I asked my high school boyfriend to drive me to my Nana and Gramps’ house.
I sat across the road and cried,
gut-wrenching, uncontrollable crying,
for all the years I hadn’t.

No one had taught me to let pain move through me,
so it came out sideways,
in anger, self-sabotage,
and pushing people away.

I remember one boyfriend telling me in the early stages of dating
that I was the nastiest person he knew.
And he wasn’t wrong.
Because when people got too close,
I’d find a way to hurt them first
before they had the chance to hurt me.
It was easier to be cruel than to be vulnerable.
Easier to push people away than to risk being seen.

So I attracted people who couldn’t go deep either.
People who lived on the surface,
who avoided their emotions just like I did.
It was perfect, for a while,
because I didn’t have to feel.
Didn’t have to talk.
Didn’t have to risk being seen.

I measured love through touch, not truth.
When things felt distant, we didn’t talk,
we buried it beneath distraction or sex and called it connection.
But it wasn’t.
It was two people trying to feel close
without ever really letting each other in.

Maybe you’ve mistaken closeness for connection too,
thinking that if someone’s body is near yours,
their heart must be too.

That worked for me, until it didn’t.

Until the numbness became unbearable.
Until I realised that living half-alive
wasn’t really living at all.

Leaving that relationship wasn’t about walking away from someone else.
It was about walking toward myself,
for the first time.

Because you can only meet someone
as deeply as you’ve met yourself,
and I hadn’t met myself at all.

Healing came slowly, through solitude, reflection, and pain.
And then, it came through a dog.

Millie.

She was the first soul who showed me that it’s okay to soften again.
That you can sit in pain without needing to fix it.

That love can exist without fear.
She reminded me that sometimes healing doesn’t require words,
just presence,
just someone sitting beside you
as you finally let go of everything you’ve been carrying.

Through her, I learned how to feel again.
How to cry without shame.
How to let love in without flinching.
And when I lost her last year,
I grieved differently.
I didn’t numb it.
I wrote.
I cried.
I talked.
I let the grief move through me.

Because if you don’t let it move through you,
it gets trapped inside you,
and it finds its way out in the most painful, destructive ways.
Grief demands to be felt.

I’ve cried more in the last few years than I did in the first twenty-seven of my life.
And that’s how I know I’m finally healing,
because I’m no longer afraid to feel.

I see now how my first heartbreak shaped everything that came after,
my independence, my anger, my fear of closeness.
We all do the best we can with what we know,
but awareness breaks the cycle.

Sometimes I think about that little girl who lost her Nana,
and with her, a part of her family.
I think about how sad and alone and confused she must’ve felt,
how she didn’t have the tools or words to understand
why everything suddenly hurt so much.

And my older self wishes I could go back and sit beside her.
Hold her hand.
Let her know she was safe,
and that the pain she felt wasn’t something to be ashamed of.
I wish I could walk that path of grief with her,
so she didn’t have to do it alone.

But I also know, no, I believe,
that everything happens for a reason.
That every moment, even the painful ones,
has led me to the life I have now.
And I’m grateful for it, all of it.
For the lessons, the healing,
for the people who’ve stayed,
and for the dogs who’ve walked beside me through it all.

We all lose someone who teaches us what love really means.
Maybe you’ve built walls too.
Maybe you’ve called it strength.
But what if softness isn’t weakness at all?
What if letting love in, fully, fearlessly,
is the bravest thing we’ll ever do?

My first heartbreak was an early lesson in love and loss.
It showed me that grief is not the opposite of love,
but proof of it,
the echo that remains when love has nowhere else to go.

I’ve come to see heartbreak as a privilege.
To have someone’s absence ache so deeply
means their presence was extraordinary.
What a gift, to love someone so much
that even their leaving still teaches you how to love.

Author’s Note

If this story touched something in you, take a moment to sit with it.
I encourage you to think about your own first heartbreak,
the one that shaped you long before you knew what heartbreak was.
We’ve all lost someone who taught us how to love.
And maybe healing begins when we stop trying to get over them,
and simply learn to carry them, gently, as we go.

A.