My first heartbreak was disastrous. That’s how I would explain the fact that I shredded hundreds of notes from my then-beloved in my bedroom, shortly after my seventeenth birthday, to the sound of our song. I had the three-ring maroon binder open on my bed and a pair of orange scissors in my hand as “Dreams” by the Cranberries blared in the background. I was cutting away what would have been the best year of my life.

Not only was he the first boy I had experimented with and given my soul to, now he had carved out a niche as my first letdown: my first real heartbreak. Our world as we knew it had come crashing down with a single kiss. A kiss that he said was nothing more than a friend who was professing her feelings for him. He told me that he tried to make her stop but she wouldn’t. He even tried to put it on the same level as being raped, an unbelievable excuse for kissing someone else. That was the moment when I knew our relationship would never be the same.

Yet somehow I forgot that I should have been seething. I let his tearful apologies win him back his sacred place in my heart. We went on to date for another four months or so, but nothing was ever the same. We both knew it. We tried with all of our might to become the two people we had been in the beginning. In the end we were just too far removed from one another to know how to do it. We lost the lazy nights of listening to music and being close with each other. I let myself fall too easily for a boy who was in college and he moved seamlessly into another relationship moments after ours ended.

After our breakup, I began to feel that everything he had told me for the past year was a sham. I began to wonder if he ever really loved me, wanted me or needed me like he always told me that he did. One day I snapped, and I figured destroying all memorabilia would be the best remedy for my broken heart. That’s how I ended up in my bedroom with a box full of pictures, a binder full of notes, and the guts to destroy every memory I had of him. I started with pictures taken down the shore and the necklaces we made for each other, worked my way up to the personal notes we wrote to each other. I cut, shredded, and ripped my way to a newly-cheerful yet broken self.

Pretty soon there were bits of paper all over my room like confetti at a party that I didn’t want to be attending. All the while I was singing along to the words of our song. I know I’ve felt like this before, but now I’m feeling it even more / Because it came from you. And then I open up and see the person falling here is me / A different way to be. The song that I had called the soundtrack to our perfect love had become a happy pop song… that I wanted to kick his ass to.

Looking back on it now, I couldn’t even tell you why our song was our song. I remember the days of sitting in my parents’ living room with my head on his chest, listening to every CD we owned - music that ran the gamut from Lisa Loeb (mine) to Bob Marley (his). Somehow the Cranberries’ “Dreams” got chosen as our song. Maybe we needed to tell each other something true and important, but we were too immature to construct the words on our own. The reason isn’t important, and has nothing to do with the way that song makes me feel to this day. I sold my Cranberries CD back to a music store, thinking I would be able to forget the horrible things it seemed to recite back to me.

Even though it has been more than fourteen years since we broke up, that song can still unleash the anger and rage that I sometimes forget I have hidden deep inside. One day, however, I re-purchased the CD as a form of torture and as a reminder of him. Sick, I know, but I had destroyed everything else. There was nothing left to capture those moments but that song. I’ve stored it away on the shelf with all the other songs that match memories and times in my life. And I move on.