Fairytales don’t always come true. There is no Cinderella or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty stories. It’s all make believe. None of that ever really happens. That’s why the books stay closed, so that the imaginary perfect lives of princesses can stay out of the real world. No one really finds the love of their life that easily without it being screwed up somehow.

At first I thought that wasn’t true and that I found the love of my life, and I truly did, but there was one thing wrong with my love, it had a defect and that defect was cancer. I have been dating my amazing boyfriend for a little over three years and things have been amazing, but about a year ago he was diagnosed with leukemia and everything has been harder. It got harder for us to be together because he was always in and out of the hospital, but we made it work. Whenever we were together we made it so it didn’t seem like anything was wrong and that everything is perfect and we forgot everything. It was like we were back to our perfect little lives where nothing was wrong and everything went just the way we wanted.  

One afternoon when we were taking a walk in the park he said that he wasn’t feeling to well and that we should probably go home because he didn’t want anything to happen. Later on that night I got a call from his mom saying that he was rushed to the hospital and that he wasn’t doing too well last night but now he was better. And that was one of the scariest and sadest moments of my life, or so I thought.

The first time that I got to visit him in the hospital I was told that he wouldn’t be able to leave because his cancer had gotten so bad. That was very hard for him because he was so adventurous and he just wanted to go out and do anything and everything and so I told him that I would be with him through this whole journey and that when he finally gets out we can go do anything and everything that he wanted. We could travel the world or we can travel around town. We could do big adventures or small ones. It didn’t really matter to me, I was just reassuring him that everything was going to be fine and that he was going to get better.

But little did I know that it was getting increasingly worse. He started getting so sick that he wouldn’t eat, drink or even talk to any of us. One time I went in to go see him he said that he couldn’t put up with the pain anymore and that he just wanted it all to end. He couldn’t deal with the fact that he could be gone at any second and it killed him to know that he would be leaving everyone behind. But I reassured him that he had to do it for his family, for me, and for himself.

He hasn’t always had the best life, at age six his dad left and took everything that they had so their mom had to basically start their lives over. They had absolutely nothing, having five kids, his mom had to take another job which meant that she was never going to be home and when she was home all she did was sleep because she was so tired from work. Since he was the oldest of five, he had to basically be the parent to the other four and that was very hard on him. The only time he was ever happy was when he was with me or his two friends.

All of the memories that we had together kept replaying in my head. Like the time when we were going to the beach and we forgot to put gas in the car so we ran out of gas on the highway and we had to call a tow truck to come and pick us up so we never made it to the beach. Or the time when we went to a concert with his friends and they were so bad that we left early and decided to go out to eat instead. Im going to miss all of those memories, but they will always be in my mind.

And that was it, at that moment he was gone. He didnt even get to experience even a fraction of the big world. Only 17 years old and gone from everyones lives. It wasn’t suppose to happen like this. It wasn’t even his fault. And this was the hardest and scariest moment of my life. But it is a message that your life can end so suddenly and that you should take every second for granted because I know that’s what he did and what I’m going to do.