When I was 18 years old I fell in love. It wasn't the love at first sight, knock you over the head type of thing. More just a noticing. Curiosity over a name. I knew nothing about him save for his physical appearance and his year in college. A senior. I know, I know, it sounds like the start to a bad rom-com. A clique. Just as writing that out is a clique. But it was more complicated than a movie could ever be.
I waited for over a year and a half before I finally got to be with him. And not in a just-for-sex kind of way but in a potentially real relationship-marriage-house-let's buy a dog way. In truth I was almost over him. Or at least I was at the point where I wanted to be and had taken the necessary steps. But that was before we spent a night together. We in a hotel room. Only we were in separate beds. It was chock full of nervous energy, in no way romantic other than scenarios that I was concocting in my own imagination. And despite being alone with the guy I wanted to be with and had pathetically pined over, throughout that night I laid fidgeting alone in my bed half wishing for the time when we would no longer be stuck in the same room together.
From my first noticing of him we spent large clumps of time together because we were on the same sports team. Every day we spent hours at practice and in the dining hall together. Only he didn't really talk to me because I was an impossibly quiet freshman and I didn't dare speak to him. Instead I learned about him, through overheard conversations and actions. This pushed my initial noticing to gradually shift into 'like.' I liked him. He was attractive, mysterious, funny in a self-deprecating way, serious, quiet but most of all kind. And as I said, it was a slow falling, the way a petal floats down onto a lakes surface, contingent on the shift of wind, the flow of events.
But as surely as the petal falls you know that as soon as it hits the surface it's going under, immediately becoming sodden and absorbed into the water. Drowning is a certainty, that the fibers of the component will disintegrate and all that will remain are dissolving parts of what it once was. The whole will cease to exist. Yet as it gently wafts down towards the water it doesn't know any better. Blame can't be placed. Destruction at the hands of an element it's very life depends upon and thirsts for isn't predicted in advance. At least not until the moment right before you hit the surface to shatter do you know that you're about to be destroyed.
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