The Girl With The Broken Heart

When Jamie and William started dating, they had no idea what was about to happen.

Once, there was a twenty-year-old girl named Jamie. She had only ever loved one man, but that was all over now. His name was William and he had loved Jamie dearly. They soon started dating after realizing they loved each other. They seemed to everyone to be the perfect match. They were often together and, when they were alone, they would cuddle and watch a movie, listen to music, or talk. They talked about everything and anything. Jamie was a virgin and William was not. He understood her fear of losing her virginity, though.

You see, her paternal grandfather had molested her multiple times throughout her middle school years. Naturally, this landed Jamie with trust issues. William respected her completely, though, and never pressured her into anything, which helped her feel safer and more trusting with him than she did with most other people.

One day, William leaned over to kiss Jamie while they were on the couch in her living room. Her parents had taken a trip two towns over the day and wouldn’t be back until after dinner. Since it was only two o’clock and she finally felt ready to give him her virginity, Jamie climbed onto Williams lap, facing him, and straddled him, then started kissing him. She was about to take him back to her bedroom, but before she could even take his hand to pull him off of the couch, a bullet cam flying through the wide-open window and hit William in his left temple.

Jamie looked out of the window to see where the bullet had come from. She saw a young man with medium brown hair that was shaggy and chin length standing on the sidewalk in front of her house. She saw that he was holding a gun and knew right away that he was the one that had just shot her beloved boyfriend. She took off her zippered hoody and used it to put pressure on William's wound while calling 911. She had never called 911 before, and to do it for her boyfriend was the most frightening thing she had ever done.

Jamie tried her best to keep him alive until the police could let the EMT's into her house. However, when she saw them leave slowly and bring back a body bag, she knew it was over. She knew he was gone and that there was no saving him. Now, the only thing she could do was go to the hospital to officially id the body and call his parents and her own. She decided to call her own first and, while she was doing that, the hospital called William's parents.

Jamie was so scared that when her mother picked up, she didn't even really know what to say. All she could say was William's name with a long pause as her mother waited to hear more. Her mother asked if they needed to rush coming home, to which Jamie answered with a quiet "yes" and hung up. Her mother texted Jamie back after hanging up her own cell phone to ask what had happened and where she was, feeling rather concerned for her daughter. She told her mother what had happened and that she was still at the hospital, sitting in the lobby of the emergency room.

She was not going to leave until William's parents had gotten there, whether her own parents were there or not. She had always hated hospitals, being afraid of the seemingly high potential for getting sick in hospitals. She knew how to take precautions, such as using hand sanitizer and washing her hands, but it had still never really provided much in the way of comfort.

She noticed that her mouth was really dry and went over to the vending machine to get a bottle of orange or apple juice. Finding neither, she decided to go with the cranberry juice that she did find. It's flavor reminded her of some of her better childhood memories, like when she would spend a month out of every summer with her maternal grandparents before they passed away. At that moment, she wanted so badly to return to those days.

Jamie was too shocked to cry, yet she felt her eyes stinging with tears. She sat there staring off into spacing, not really capable of much else. She pulled the loose sleeves of her long-sleeved shirt up when she noticed that she suddenly felt really overheated. She had never had a desire to cut herself, but she did in this moment. Though she wanted to put the emotional pain that she was feeling into some physical form rather than feel it emotionally she was glad that there was nothing she could use to cut herself. She knew that if she just thought about it enough, she wouldn't want to cut at all and that she would try to think about some other way to express her emotions.

She thought about what had happened in her living room and the young man she saw standing on the sidewalk. She thought about how this must have been how Romeo felt when he found out Juliet had died and how Juliet must have felt when she saw that Romeo had ingested poison and then watched him die. She finally understood why the play so often called by just the name of the two main characters was actually named "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet." It was truly a tragedy and she could think of greater pain than watching the one person that you love the most in this world die before your very eyes.

Jamie could feel her heart breaking inside her chest and then she felt it burst into a million pieces.