Story #1-
I was never in love with him.
Not that children can't fall in love, because I believe they can in their own special way, but that's not how it went for me.
I did like him, though. I liked him a lot.
Honestly, I don't remember what first stood out to me about him. I remember that he was friendly. Kind. I was an 11-year-old girl with thick bangs, big glasses and a disease that no one else my age had. The first time I met him my family had just moved back from a foreign country where my world had been tipped upsidedown. A different language would sometimes randomly pop out of my mouth to go with my stories about killing turnatulas and the giant centipeed that we poured gasoline on and lit on fire. I would clam up when I saw the other kids wasting food because I had seen children starving to death. But somehow, despite all the things going on in my head, I noticed him, and he noticed me and took the time to show me that. I don't think he meant anything by it, but my heart gripped that tiny bit of attention and held onto it for dear life.
I only saw him from time to time, when we would travel to visit family. Our interactions really weren't anything special, but to me everything about him was special. When I was 13, I found out that my two best friends had crushes on him and I decided to stop liking him in case he went for one of them.
He never did. In fact, he didn't go for anybody for a long time, and I would wonder, as a young adult, that maybe, if we spent time together as 22, 23, 24 year olds, something more would spark? Wouldn't that be a story; old crush from summer camp finally falling in love with awkward, little me.
We're still friends, still chat and catch up if we randomly bump into each other. We still have the same circle of people we keep in touch with that we knew as kids. That's how I know that he recently fell in love and married a girl I've never met before. He had to wait a long time to fall in love and I hope she knows just how lucky she is to have him.
Story #2-
I was never in love with him.
But not because I didn't want to be.
Not in the least.
With everything inside of me I wanted to be in love with him!
Why wouldn't I? He loved Jesus, he loved his family, he loved kids, he loved his friends. He was always the one encouraging purity and righteousness amongst his peers. He played guitar and knew how to dance. At the age of 15, he was absolutely perfect and I was anything but. Everything in my life was an emotional mess as I sorted out my mind, heart and feelings about moving halfway around the world as a teenager. Day 2 in the country and I met him when he invited my siblings and I to youth group. Did I forget to mention that he was one of the most attractive young men I had ever met in my life? That was helpful.
There were little things, like the time a group of us hiked in the Middle Atlas mountains for 4 hours and by the end I was in so much pain I could hardly walk so he carried me. And the time when a man was falling asleep on me in the back of a taxi and he called me so I could talk to him and wake up the man. Or the time when it was my birthday and he traveled with 2 of my dearest friends to spend the day with me.
I wanted it to be him.
Maybe if I had been a little more perfect, or had a better grip on my life that time a group of us stayed up all night talking and I confessed how much I was struggling with things. But maybe not. Years went by and I convinced myself that I had moved on, until he would show up and my heart was ruined all over again. Not that he ever knew how far my stomach sunk when he walked away as a 21-year-old man, away from me and the guy standing beside me who would never come close to being to me what he was. If only I had known I would run into him in the street that day! If only I had been able to sit and have a conversation with him! Like I said, maybe if I had had a better grip on my life...
A few months later he fell in love, not with me, of course, and I wished him all the best, because that's what he was; the best.
Story #3-
I was never in love with him.
I thought I was, because I thought I had to be.
In the end he never had enough of my heart to truly make me fall in love with him.
Sure, he gave me butterflies and the first time he held my hand on the bus in Thailand I thought I could never be happier, but love? I didn't even know what love was supposed to really look like. 19 years old and fresh from the mountains of North Africa, I was a bit lost without my sister, my country, and you remember story #2? Yeah, was super stuck on him.
It didn't take long for me to realize that I was soaking up his attention and he was more than happy to dish it out. I'm not sure what he saw in me, but there weren't a lot of options and I was clearly up for his game of who could flirt the most. It scared me to feel my heart become attatched to this stranger, this man who was opposite of everything I had fallen for with the boy in story #2. Then he told me he liked me and I thought it was a sign that everything was going to be okay. He was, after all, the only boy in America to have ever declared feelings for me.
Our relationship was awkward with a few sweet moments that made me hold on too tight to something that I should have seen as bad. Not bad as in he manipulated me or used me or abused me, but bad as in long-distance sucks and I never saw the way he flirted with the other girls after I left. Bad as in once the excitement of "catching me" wore off, our conversations were shallow and rushed. I don't blame him completely; neither of us knew how to be in a relationship, but I do blame him because he should have known better than to make me think everything was pefect and then break up with me over the phone 10 days later.
He ended up dating, and later marrying, a girl I used to go to summer camp with. Every so often I tell people the story about my only real ex-boyfriend and wonder what he's doing with his life. I suppose I could check his facebook, but I guess I don't really care to know that badly...
Story #4-
I'm not saying I was in love with him, because it didn't last long enough really know if it was love or not, but I will say that no one else has ever made me feel like him.
The day I met him I wrote in my journal that I would marry him.
The day I met him I was wearing my red long-sleeved shirt that I still have in the back of my dresser drawer.
The day I met him I was 21. The boy from story #2 was dating the girl he would later marry, and it had been a year and a half since the boy from story #3 dumped me.
It wasn't a thunderclap or lightening bolt type of feeling when I met him. In fact, he noticed me before I even noticed him. He told me later that he loved how I was singing Christmas carols and skipping around the apartment waiting for everyone to be ready. I laughed because, honestly, I should have been helping get the tea and cookies together. We were going to pass them out to homeless people in the old city, my neighborhood actually, and there were new faces there along with the normal crowd of friends.
As the evening progressed, I was drawn to him more and more. He was funny, brilliant, kind and different from every other man from that country that I had ever met. I was so much more than an American girl to him; I was Samira, or Sam as he later began calling me. We found out we were literally neighbors and had lived within a block of each other for the last 3 months.
I didn't give him my phone number that night, but later I wished I had. We talked for hours on MSN chat and he told me he liked me. I don't think my feet touched the ground for weeks after that. One of the best nights of my life was the night I had to go out to buy blank CDs from an internet cafe and he asked if he could come along. I brought two of my little brothers and we walked around our neighborhood for over an hour, laughing, joking, chasing each other's shadows and soaking in every moment. There was a point when I stood back and watched him pick up my 3-year-old brother to make him laugh and my heart just burst. I had never felt that way about someone ever in my life. We ended up buying the CDs from the shop we had stopped at first. He laughed at me when I did the math wrong to figure out how much it would cost, then he paid for them himself. Everything about that night was perfect.
He drew me a picture a couple months later that was of two snakes out of their holes during a storm. It signified two lovers defying all odds and staying together even when people were telling them the wouldn't work out.
That picture, however, wasn't meant to be us. March 24th, less than 4 months after meeting, my family and I left that neighborhood. Left that country. Left that Continent. We emailed a few times, but bad things were being said about me, and several of our mutual friends cut me off. He said it didn't matter what other people were saying, however it was only a matter of weeks before he had blocked me from facebook and stopped responding to emails. The last time I heard from him was days before my 22nd birthday when he said that it was his cousin who had changed all his passwords and deleted his friends on facebook. I believed him until nothing changed.
Sometimes when I am desperate to see his face again, to know how he is doing, I try to search for him on the internet. One time I found a paper he had written and I read the whole thing. I didn't understand it, but I read it anyway.
Maybe one day I'll run into him again. I'll ask him if he's fallen in love, if he has a family. I hope the answer is yes, because I want him to be happy. For all the happiness he brought me in that short space of time when we lived just down the street from each other, I hope he has happiness in his life.
Story #5-
I didn't want to be in love with him.
I wasn't supposed to be! It wasn't supposed to end up that way!
But it did. I fell in love with him.
I'm not blaming my sister, but he was her friend first, and when she moved away the summer I turned 22, we were both left with an empty space in our lives. We didn't exclusively fill that space with each other, but it was nice to have a friend who was free to hang out whenever I wanted, would always text me back and gradually became more and more familiar.
What happened between us happened so slowly I didn't even notice it was happening until one day I was 25 and realizing that I enjoyed life so much more when I was with him. When I was scared or lonely, he was my first thought, when I was having a bad day he was the first person I turned to and if I needed anything, I knew he would be there for me. People started asking us if we were dating. He always said no, but...
What is dating? Is it going to Walmart at midnight to buy $40 worth of junk food to eat while staying up until 4am watching TV and cartoons? Is it texting him to come get you when you want to get out of your house? Is it him driving you around to look at Christmas lights for hours because he knows you love it even though he could care less? Is it him taking you to your favorite place to eat as a surprise because he knows you've had a rough day? Is it going with him to his parent's house on Christmas day and spending the evening with them, playing games and realizing that he picked your card to win in Apples to Apples on purpose?
Whether or not what we did was technically "dating", when he suddenly cut me out of his life to date some other girl that he used to work with, it hurt. Forget about all the falling in love stuff; he had been one of my closest and best friends for three years and in a matter of 2 days, I was nothing. We had a few moments of texting back and forth, hanging out, catching up, but it wasn't the same. I became tired of texting him and never getting a response, so I stopped.
He didn't seem to care, because two whole years went by before he even texted me again... to invite me to his wedding.
Sure, he never actually told me that he was as in love with me as I was with him, but he did tell me, "Baylea, I don't care what is playing on the radio, as long as you're with me."
In a couple months he will marry the girl he fell in love with while I was still in love with him. Maybe I'll go. Maybe I won't.
Maybe by then I'll have someone of my own to fall in love with.
