"That Girl"

For a few guys, or at least for me, there was always “that girl” in high school. “That girl” for me didn’t change weekly like it did for most guys. She was passive and quiet, which was not at all that different from myself. Existing in her presence, I could feel a barrier that surrounded her like a thin protective layer. That barrier was the conqueror of my shyness, and thus I never did actually talk to her the way I would’ve liked. There are all sorts of commercials, TV shows, and movies, where two people fall in love by simply the first glance they share. Skeptics say that is why they are fake, but some romantics think otherwise.

I know what you’re thinking. I was a young teenage boy in puberty prime who didn’t know love from lust any more he did his Algebra from his Calculus. That is the point I would beg to differ. I admit to being influenced by my teenage chemistry. There’s no doubt in my mind that there isn’t a person on the planet who isn’t at that age. Yet, the feelings I harbored for “that girl” were something of a different nature. Now I bet you think I was one of those strange boys who wanted a girl’s hand in marriage without knowing anything about her. A lost cause of raging hormones who would at the drop of a hat give anything and everything that he possessed to spend the rest of his life with someone. Perhaps even to the point where it would be considered unhealthy and even stalking. Fortunately for both of us, I was no such person. I understood things at that age, and about her, that transcended the boundaries most high school teens love by.

I knew I couldn’t say I loved her yet, but the feeling was there. It was there as a force that existed only within me, constantly testing my patience, maturity, and willpower. I don’t know what type of childhood led me to love this way, but I was happy with it. She was not one of the most gorgeous girls of the school, but admittedly it was her face which struck me when I first saw her. From being in class with her, something else began to form inside of my heart. Save the illusion that I spied on her whenever given the chance. I was no more a spy than Romeo a maniac. From seeing her every day, even if only in that one class we had together, I caught a glimpse of something else. It was an inner beauty that I saw lying underneath what was on the outside. I didn’t know how it was there, or what true treasures lay hidden, but I was certain it was there. I sensed it every day of the semester.

My intentions for “that girl” were not as typical as you may think. I did not want to have sex with her, I did not want to marry her, and I did not want to give up everything I had for her at the drop of a hat. I understood that the connection I had with her was still only within my heart and my mind. Anything within the realm of possibility was still up in the air for scrupulous examination. For most normal people, they feel a connection and go with it. Most normal guys would have already talked to her by now. Sadly, the only thing I could let myself do was follow my heart, and it told me to stay quiet at that time. I was afraid of scaring her away. I at times allowed my imagination to get the better of me. Regrettably so, since the imagination is an incredibly powerful and manipulative tool to the self. When the imagination asks “what if”, we carry out a scenario. Such scenarios are only fantasy, make-believe, and often never come true. For this reason I tried to keep my imagination to a minimum, even though it was extremely difficult.

When our last semester as seniors together ended, my heart ached in a horrible fashion. I thought that I would be losing the opportunity I had waited for all these years. Graduation came and went, and I thought I would never see her again. Something inside of me tried to reassure me, but the sorrow that accompanies a lonely heart is overpowering to any force. Gradually I let myself slip in to despair, but never allowed it to visibly show to anyone. My plans were to go to a local college for two years and then transfer to a larger university. I wondered if I’d meet a girl at either place that made me feel the same way I did about “that girl”. A part of me hoped that I would, and a part of me swore that I wouldn’t. Emotionally torn, I struggled through my first two years of college. Heading in to my third year of college my expectations had lowered significantly. I now had no plans to go out of my way to love anyone else, since the heartbreak that accompanied it was far too stressful.

I was living in an apartment off of campus, and was preparing for my first week of classes for fall semester. The week was winding its way down, and I felt the ever-intimidating presence of loneliness begin to creep up on me. I suppose it is a bit like seeing a policeman walking up to your front door after hearing your child has been in an automobile accident. You know what he is going to say, and you know that it will ruin your life, so you just pray to God that he stops. You pray that he is at the wrong house, or that he has made some other kind of mistake. The policeman was very near ringing my doorbell on Thursday afternoon, when suddenly he disappeared. I am not a very strong believer of fate or religion, and I like to think that things happen just because. There never has to be a reason that things happen, they just do. For this reason I was shocked when I entered my last class of the week and found her sitting in the front row.

Determined that the timing of our encounter was much more suitable than it was in high school, I decided to see what would happen. I sat down next to her and introduced myself. I was wringing my heart dry, trying to play it cool, and preparing myself for the biggest rejection of my life – all at once. I remember her exact words to this day, “Hey. Oh, hey, didn’t you go to my high school? Didn’t we have a class together or something? You look really familiar.” Over two years of torment and waiting were over, and I was finally confronting her. I’m not extremely smooth with women, and most the time I’m too nervous to know what to say. Yet finally getting the chance to talk to her opened a pathway inside of me. I wasn’t nervous, sweating, or anything which would have shown how I truly felt. We saw each other each Thursday for a few weeks until finally she asked me if I wanted to hang out with her at her apartment on Saturday. I, of course, said yes.

Neither one of us were very big party animals. We were both relatively quiet individuals, and so we did relatively quiet things. Most people would consider them boring things like playing Scrabble or reading books together. She and I found them to be very fun, though. One day I bought a puzzle for us to work on whenever we had free time. It was a huge puzzle which would take us a couple of months to finish. The only rule I had was that I made her promise to do it with me upside down, since it was more challenging that way. We laid the puzzle out and started it on a space next to her couch. We didn’t even get 1/15th of the way done on the first night. We would work on it silently and diligently, weekend after weekend. It was a little over a month after I had initially seen her in class that she shared something with me.

She had been writing a story online for a couple of months now, and wanted to know what I thought of it. It still wasn’t done, but she updated it every few days or so with another chapter. When I checked it, I saw how hundreds of people had left their comments about the story. Everyone loved it. I started reading from the very beginning and was already up to the most current chapter in only a matter of hours. The story was about the struggling love between two people who had known each other since high school. A part of me felt like she was telling our story, but since she had started writing it before we even met each other again I knew that couldn’t be. I could tell the story was about to reach a conclusion, since the two lovers were becoming more and more serious with each sentence. I wondered if they would end up breaking up and parting, or if they would live happily ever after. I checked her online story every day from that day forward.

Over the following months we studied for our class together, went out to movies together, and often times talked on the phone. What was once originally an enjoyable friendship, was soon becoming something much more. I had no idea where this emotional roller coaster was taking me. The feelings that I had were only slightly different than from when I was in high school. Back then it was always something that I longed for, but now it was something that I was making come true. My fundamental reasoning and emotions were the same, though. I loved her much in the same way I had over two years ago, and still sensed the exact same connection every time I was with her. This made me slightly relieved, since I was beginning to wonder if I was just a strange boy in high school after all. It turns out following my heart was the correct thing to do in the end.

The semester was coming to a close, but she and I still spent as much time as possible together. When we weren’t out and about we were still working on the puzzle, which was now down to only about two hundred pieces. While we sat continuing to solve it, I asked her why she had stopped writing her story. Honestly a part of me was worried, since I had previously taken her story as the development of our current ongoing relationship. If she suddenly stopped writing it, perhaps that meant she no longer wanted to be with me. She said that with final exams coming up she hadn’t had much time to write, and that it might take until Christmas break to finish it. I leaned over to kiss her, and we spent the rest of the night in each other’s arms. We ended up falling asleep together on the couch, and by the time we woke up it was already eleven. Both of us rushed to make it to our classes, leaving the puzzle still unfinished on the floor.

The final week of school was the hardest there ever was for either of us. We both had four final exams to study for, and they were each on a different day of that week. On Friday afternoon I waited outside of her last class to greet her and congratulate her on completing her last final. She was wearing possibly the biggest smile I had ever seen her with when she came out of the classroom. I asked her if she was really that happy to be done with school for a month, and she said, “No, I’m just happy to see you.”

I spent the night at her house that night, and tried to the best of my ability to make a romantic meal for her. There was candlelight on a small table-for-two, with a bouquet of roses serving as a centerpiece. In that moment we held each other’s hands and looked in to each other’s eyes. We never had been much for talking, and in this moment neither of us had to. To this day that moment remains the highlight of my entire life. After eating and cleaning up afterwards, we cozied down on her couch. I was leaving the next day to go home for the holidays, so I had to eventually go back to my own place to pack my clothes among many other things. I was just getting up off the couch and she begged me to stay just another hour, since she wasn’t tired yet. “Tell you what”, I said. “Since we’re both leaving tomorrow, why don’t you go ahead and finish the puzzle?” She seemed unenthusiastic about it, most likely because it was something we had done together and she wanted to finish it together. She sighed and kissed me goodbye and told me to drive safely. Driving home I felt the spirit of December and the spirit of love wash over my car. The waiting was definitely worth it if I had more of this to look forward to.

Back at my place I began packing. It took several hours to finally get everything together, and I was quite exhausted when I was finally done. Before heading to bed I logged on to check my e-mail. Just next to the e-mail Bookmark Tab on my browser was her website, and curious as I always am, I clicked it to see if she had finished the story yet. I no longer thought that it was really about us, since I was really the only one who had feelings for the other in high school. I knew she didn’t really feel that connection then, so I tried to suppress my imagination once again as best I could.

In her story the man and woman were getting along incredibly well, and their feelings for one another were at an all time high. I was rooting for their relationship to be a healthy and successful one, and secretly hoped that the man would propose to her before she ended the story for good. To my surprise, when I visited her site I saw that she had added her latest chapter, entitled: “Final Chapter”. My heart began to beat intensely as I began devouring her words. The more I read, the more my heart pumped. I was finally realizing so many things while reading her story. There was so much that I hadn’t understood, and until then I thought that I never would. After reading over fifty-five chapters of her original story, I finally reached the last paragraph of it all:

And then he took her hand, and guided the last piece of the puzzle to its final destination. After working with her for months, they had finally completed it. At first she didn’t know what to think. She thought that the man was probably very proud that they had been able to complete it, and happy that they had done it together. The man kissed her goodnight and told her that he’d see her sometime the next afternoon. Just before she went to bed, she walked over to the puzzle and reached down to break it before putting the pieces back in to the box. Instead of breaking it, though, she lifted it with both hands very carefully, and flipped it over. On the other side was a woman in a white wedding dress standing at an altar, with a man in his tuxedo bending down on one knee with a wedding ring in his outstretched hand. The woman had one hand held up to her face to wipe away tears of joy. In the background white doves were flying overhead, and she swore she could hear the church bells that were painted so eloquently above the podium. She began to cry harder than she ever had in her life. Her dreams - her silly fantasies – were all coming true. She never thought that she would be alive to live such a day where she was this happy, and her heart overflowed with affection. She picked up her phone, and called her lover back, who upon answering asked, “Will you marry me?” One last final sob worked its way out from deep within her chest, before she managed to say, “Yes. Of course I will.”

My heart barely had time to react, before my phone began to ring.