“you’re one in a million,
you’re once in a lifetime,
you made me discover one of the stars above us...”
so here i am, sitting in a room, all by myself, still upset after seven whole months of being ignored, dodged, avoided, not just by anyone but he only happens to be the one guy that i have the strongest feelings for. after seven months of bumping shoulders, few glances were caught, and zero confrontations, here i sit, feeling miserable and inferior. how did i get to this state of woebegone? well, before i tell you about my so-called “first love,” just for confidential reasons, let’s call him “boii” okay? now, onto the trip down memory lane...
“sometimes love can hit you every day,
sometimes you can fall for everyone you see,
only one can really make me stay”
i met boii, as i recall, my freshman year of high school. i didn’t meet him at gunderson, no, he goes to a completely different high school, completely different district, and he’s in a completely different grade level. so how did i meet him? i met him at vlma, the home of my passion for tae kwon do. i don’t remember much about our first talk in person, but i do remember that i first talked to him on aim, in a tae kwon do chat-room one night and got his screen name from there. although i kept his screen name, i never worked up the courage to instant message him myself, so i just kept it there and didn’t pay much attention to it. after a few weeks, i received an instant message from Boii’s screen name and his first words to me were:
“so like yea”
yeah, not exactly the words that you would expect to be the “starter” of a conversation between a boy and a girl, but what can i say? boii was just that kind Of guy who never ceases to surprise you. from that conversation on, my life has been one crazy roller coaster of emotions of both happiness and sadness, full of laughs and tears, appreciation and rejection. boii was the type of guy who would call up a girl at three o’ clock in the morning just “because,” no emergencies, just to “talk.” i still wonder how i ever kept up with this guy. i still remember all of our conversations over the phone pretty clearly. throughout a short amount of weeks, this guy has taught me so much about life. he taught me to be patient, to raise my standards in relationships, to wait it out, to not rush to the “i love you’s” and etc. he gave me pointers and tips from a guy’s perspective and around that time, i guess i didn’t realize it but i was attracted to boii. i was so blinded bY my feelings for another guy that i didn’t bother to feel the connection i felt with boii. after a few weeks of nonstop late-night calls, i finally became aware of the feelings that were developing towards him. at first, i tried to stop those feelings from developing because i knew that he liked someone already. sadly, as i came to realize, it’s not that easy.
“a sign from the sky
said to me...
you’re one in a million,
once in a lifetime,
you made me discover one of the stars above us”
from that point forward, the late conversations only got better and better. one night, while we were both silent on the phone, boii broke the silence by singing the song one in a million by boson to me and I still remember how amazed i was by his voice while he sang softly to me over the phone. i simply closed my eyes, letting his soft singing lull me slowly to sleep.
“i've been looking for that special one,
and i've been searching for someone to give my love,
and when i thought that all the hope was gone
you smile, there you were and i was gone”
around november of 2007, he asked me to chill with him at the mall, to find a gift for his friend’s birthday as he had put it. We decided on a date and the memories of that day are still fixated in the back of my mind. we searched around the mall for about an hour or two and then after that unsuccessful attempt at shopping, he pulled me into an elevator ride up to the fourth floor, in other words, the parking lot on top of the whole mall. at that moment, i had no idea where we were going for i had never went up there before in my life, so i just followed him. the view from up there was simply breathtaking because it was around time the sun set that day and it was just a magical moment for me and boii. he hugged me while we were up there staring off into the sunset, and even though he didn’t say a single word, his eyes told me everything i’ve always wanted to hear: “i love you.” i really couldn’t have asked for a better way to end my day because i felt like i was standing on top of the world wIth no one other than the boy i liked and at that moment, there was no better word to describe that moment than the word: perfect.
“i always will remember how i felt that day
a feeling indescribable to me
yeah
i always knew there was an answer for my prayer
and you, you're the one, the one for me”
after all that, you would probably expect us to admit our love and live happily ever after right? well, unfortunately, it hurts me to say that instead, it was the complete opposite. boii stopped all his late-night phone calls, stopped making eye contact with me, stopped instant messaging me, and so on. i actually did try talking to him once at tae kwon do after that day at the mall, but he just walked away from me. to me, it felt much more than that. i don’t know why but it felt like the boy i was infatuated with had just completely walked out of my life. for the longest time, i felt like i wasn’t good enough for him, that there was something wrong with me, that i did something wrong that day at the mall. i tried to have fun without him in my Life. i tried to go to social gatherings the kids at tae kwon do held. i tried to forget about him. i even tried to delete his number off my phone like a million times but nothing seemed to work. around christmas time of 2007, my friends at tae kwon do decided to host a christmas party including the game, secret santa. we drew names from a hat and by a freakishly weird miracle of some sort, i pulled out boii’s name. i was baffled and i just stood there speechless, staring at that little piece of paper with his name on it. i looked left and right, inside and out of the mall, for a present that will somewhat remind him of me. it didn’t matter to me as much anymore at that time that we stopped taLking. i mean, i still cared for him, a lot, but like i was done thinking about him and crying over him. i never felt so weak and vulnerable in my life, until i went through those seven months without him. i ended up buying him a sweater and i wrapped it up all nice and neat and everything before that party. how did it end up? let’s just say, he never showed up to the party. he couldn’t make it and i spent the end of that party crying over it. i told myself i wasn’t going to waste my tears crying over a boy anymore but my emotions had the best of me and i couldn’t control them no matter how hard i tried.
“i was cool and everything was possible,
they tried to catch me but it wasn't possible
no one could hurt me it was my game,
until i met you baby and we're the same”
i had never gone through this much pain in my life and that puts me Where i am right now, seven months later, still wondering what i did wrong. was it something i did? was it something i said? lately, it seems that i haven’t been able to do anything but cry and try to think of reasons. i keep asking myself the “what if’s” and the “why’s” and, seriously, if this is love, i don’t ever want it again.
after telling myself this, i learned to occupy my mind with better things like friendship. i focused on building relationships with the people around me who care about me rather than waste my time sulking over a guy who didn’t even try to talk to me anymore. from this point, we’re going to flash forward a bit to the summer of 2008.
during the summer of ’08, a few days before the beginning of my sophomore yeAr, i told my best friend the story about boii while we were hanging out on the stone bleachers at gunderson. surprisingly, out of nowhere, she grabbed my phone and immediately went through my contacts list. she scrolled down my contacts list until she found his name, pressed call, and then handed me the phone. It felt as if all of time and space froze right there and then. i stood there, completely immobilized, staring at her like she was crazy while hearing the dialing tone of the phone. at that moment, my mind was in a complete frenzy. a part of me was hoping he would answer while the other half was praying that he wouldn’t pick up. i admit it, i was scared out of my mind. i had never been able to work up the courage to call his number after that christmas party incident. but now, here i am, phone in my hand with his voice on the other line, waiting for me to speak. The conversation, let’s just say, didn’t last very long and ended with him saying:
“i’m kind of busy right now, i’ll call you back later.”
a spark of hope Flew up inside of me, but at the same time a hint of disappointment hit me and my heart dropped. i kept telling myself that, at least he said he’ll call me back right? even with all the self-convincing i did to myself, i still had doubts about him. in addition to that, i was still uncontrollably shaking in the inside from either the nervousness of hearing his voice again after so long or the fear that i was getting myself into something that’ll once again, end horribly. it took me a little while to recover from that little shock and i still thank my best friend, ‘till this day, for making that phone call for me when i was too weak and scared to do it myself. astonishingly, boii did call me back, that very night and we had a long conversation to get catch up with each other’s lives again. i updated him on my life for the last seven months, never mentioning the hurt or pain he put me through and he told me about his school life and friends. near the end of our conversation, the avoided topic was finally brought up and i asked him to tell me the truth to why he stopped talking to me for those seven months. he was reluctant to answer my question, but he agreed with me that i had the right to know it so he made me a promise. the prOmise went a little something like this:
“i will tell you on november 11th, 2011, at 11:11”
i couldn’t possibly wait three years to hear his answer, so i kind of rushed things a bit. in june of 2008, only a few months after we started talking again, i found the perfect opportunity. during our tae kwon do testing, i made up a plan. since i was going to see him in person at 11:11 p.m., i would demand the answer from him. my plan worked, but the result was basically just another direct hit to my heart. long story short, he told me that he: “found out from someone that i had feelings for him, but he didn’t return my feelings, so he decided to back off and give me space.” that answer emotionally tore me in half. i thought that i could handle the truth coming from him. i thought that i would be able to act maturely after hearing it. i thought that the truth wouldn’t hurt me as much because of the time and space he had put between us, but i was proven wrong, of course. at that moment, i realized that life was not a fairy tale and it was not always going to have a happily-ever-after ending. plans change, things go wrong, and not everything is what it seems.
“and when you didn't want me, i wanted you
because the finer thing about it was i like the show
i like it when its difficult i like it when it's hard
you know it's worth it that you found your heart”
of couRse, being the person he was, he decided to call me that very night to check to see if i was fine. obviously, i wasn’t. i tried to sound okay on the phone with him, but of course, i couldn’t fake it for long. he broke through the fake laughs, the fake “i’m fine’s” from me and realized that i was indeed, not okay. i told him that it was not his fault and that it was mine for being so stupid and foolish in the first place. i blamed myself for believing in fairy tale endings and for mistaking his friendliness with something more. i tried to put the blame on myself to make myself feel better, somehow. i really did not expect him to apologize to me so sincerely. i really didn’t want him to apologize at all. i cried my heart out that night on the phone with boii because there were no restrictions on what we could say. we said all that we needed to and i basically poured my heart out over the phone with him. i ended our conversation short that night because just when i thought i was done crying, another set of tears would start falling again and i didn’t want to burden him and make him feel like it was his job to stop a crYing girl. it took us both a while to get over the awkwardness that was between us after that conversation, a few weeks, to be exact. we started talking again like before and the late night calls resumed. sadly, our happy days didn’t exactly last that long. that same summer, boii met someone new from out of state. she was a relative of one of the kids at tae kwon do so she came and watched us practice everyday. he told me that for the first time in his life, he fell in love at first sight. he always sounded so happy whenever he talked about her, so i just let him. i didn’t want to interrupt him while he talked about her but deep inside of me, i wanted to just scream. scream from agony, scream from jealousy, scream for him to just notice me. that was all i wanted, that was everything i wanted, and as much as i wanted all that, i knew that it was never going to happen. he was never going tO see me as anything more than a friend and i had to face that fact. at the end of that summer, i decided to give up on that idea and move on. i mean, why bother chasing someone when he’s too busy chasing someone else? why throw your heart out there when he’s not even looking in your direction?
“you're one in a million
you're once in a lifetime
you made me discover one of the stars above us”
it took me forever to attempt to convince myself that it was never going to happen, that boii and i were never going to be an “us,” that it will forever remain that way, that it just wasn’t meant to be, that this was life and i just had to bUild a bridge and get over it. although me and boii still talk every now and again, although he still sings to me late at night over the phone, although he still talks about his “love”, although he still apologizes to me every chance he gets, i’ve come to realize that i used to let him have control over my life without even realizing it and that had to change. all i needed was some time to steady myself and let myself control my life, no one else but me. on and off, boii and i will call each other late at night just to “talk.” yes, we still talk from midnight to sunrise, we still wake up with really bad headaches and sore eyes, we still crash at the end of every conversation, we still hang out at the mall around that time of the year, we still talk at tae kwon do, i still get all bubbly inside when i see him, i still call him up when i’m feeling sad, but the only difference this year is that i’m stronger than i was last year and i will only grow stronger from this point on. i know that i will probably never get over him because of the impact he has made in my life. all i can do from this point on is move forward. the memories we shared were special and i’ll never forget them, but at the same time, i would never go back and change a thing because everything happens for a reason, right?
“you're one in a million...”
Torn between two choices,
