SENIOR YEAR WAS NOT A LOVE STORY

Captured by Mitchell Royel in the Fashion District, now playing “You Again [E]” by Ally Hills—unfinished business, and just enough danger in the air to make nostalgia feel expensive.

Senior year in Malibu had a way of making everything feel more cinematic than it really was. The ocean was close, graduation was coming, and every conversation seemed to carry that last-semester intensity, like everything needed a bigger meaning just because it was about to end. I remember talking with you in class, trying to understand things in terms of us, or at least in terms of what you seemed to want me to think “us” meant. But to be clear, there was no official us. There was no grand romance here, no private contract, no exclusivity. You were not my boyfriend. That distinction matters, and it still matters now.

I think that is part of why what happened right before graduation landed the way it did. When I found out you had lowballed me to the degree that you did, it did not read to me as complicated. It did not feel romantic, messy, or emotionally profound. It felt cheap. It felt attention-seeking. It felt exploitative. More than anything, it felt like the kind of move someone makes when they are more invested in control, image, or reaction than in being real.

And honestly, that did not genuinely break my heart.

I know people like to turn every disappointment into a heartbreak narrative because it sounds more poetic, but that is not what this was. This was not some devastating collapse that changed my life. It was just revealing. It showed me your level of character, or lack of it, and once I saw that clearly, there was not much left to debate. I was not shattered. I was not spiraling. I was not sitting around making you the center of my emotional universe. I was mostly just looking at the situation for what it was and thinking: that is deeply uncool.

If anything, I feel sorry for you. Sorry that you needed to make something smaller than it was. Sorry that you seemed to confuse proximity with significance. Sorry that you apparently thought diminishing me would somehow elevate you. There is something embarrassing about that kind of behavior, especially in hindsight. It is one thing to be immature in high school. It is another thing entirely to build your choices around that immaturity and expect other people to take it seriously.

What happens now is actually very simple: I do not speak to you.

That is it. No dramatic fallout. No ongoing war. No need for some performative narrative about damage or revenge. We are not on speaking terms, and life is essentially the same. It is chill. The world did not stop. My goals did not change. My direction did not change. My life did not suddenly reorganize itself around what you did, because I am not willing to make fringe concessions to my future over somebody else’s weak behavior.

That part is important to me. I am not shrinking my plans, softening my standards, or rerouting my focus because you chose to act in a way that was beneath me. I am not making myself more cautious, more confused, or more available to nonsense just because you decided to be a douche. You do not get that kind of influence. You do not get to leave behind some dramatic legacy in my life when, in reality, the lasting consequence is just that I no longer deal with you.

And maybe that is what stings for certain people: not being hated, not being mourned, just being cut off and left behind. No grand speech. No collapse. No special role in the story. Just distance, clarity, and consequences.

We are not in high school anymore. Whatever that was, it ended there. I am not speaking to you, not because you broke my heart, but because I see you clearly now, and that is more than enough reason. Life goes on. Mine, especially, goes on well.

-Ryder, Mitchell Royel