chapter one.
”I was eleven years old when I met the girl I wanted to marry. I was sixteen years old when I realized how shamelessly, in love with her I truly was. I was nineteen years old when I knew I could not live without her. And I was twenty-eight years old when I finally did something about it.
I always believed in love. True love. The kind of love that was really, real. The love that kept you up at night because your life was now so much better than any dream you could ever have. As an adult now, I look back on my younger years and blamed my lust for love on all the Disney movies I watched as a child. Those movies made me believe that life always worked out the way it should have, when it should have. In all honesty, Disney movies are not actually that far off from real life. In real life, things do always work out the way they are supposed to. The difference is, ‘the happily ever after’ we expect for ourselves is not always the one life gives us. The same painful, truth applies to love.
I grew up thinking that one day I would meet a nice girl. We would date, commit to each other, and have a family. I thought that was what was supposed to happen. I thought that was how it happened for everyone and that there really was not much to it. One thing Walt Disney forgot to mention to me and everyone else in the world who followed his craft, was that even if you love someone, that is no golden ticket to guaranteed happiness. Sometimes we love people who don’t love us back. And sometimes people love each other in different ways at different times. I couldn’t wrap my head around that when I was younger. At one time, I really believed that just love was enough. Actually, I could not wrap my head around the idea that unrequited loved existed until my late twenties.
Love to me was cheesy old school movies and sitcoms. I thought love meant that I would meet someone, look at them, and as the cliché’ says, “The rest was history.” Thinking real hard, I guess that did happen. I did meet someone; I did take one look at her and know that the rest was history. The only problem, was I spent so much of the history we had trying to read her mind, and wait for the perfect moment to have our perfect ending. Instead of always letting my fear hold me back from completely losing myself in her eyes, I should have fought for her. I should have made sure she knew how I felt before it was too late.”
