Looking Back

He walked into my life through my apartment door wearing a black shirt and jeans. He was young, nineteen, and full of life and himself. We sat by the computer for a hour or so and discussed topics of no certain importance. He smiled often and laughed with the purity of someone not yet jaded by life and what it had handed him. When that boy smiled that crocked smile I two felt hope again. I worried that my soul was being worn on my face like the dimple on his. From that initial conversation I realized my life would forever be changed, how I wasn’t quite sure, but something inside of me shifted.

A few months later fate would have it that he would walk through the same doorway, only this time it was to stay. He became my roommate due to circumstances I couldn’t control. Not to say anything against this crazy young man, but being older and extremely wiser after living a enduring twenty two years, I realized that this was not the most intelligent choice. So reluctantly he took the room adjacent from mine and our story began.

We would sit up and talk until it was time for him to wonder off into his own world of slacking and text until one in the morning. We would play frisbee in the park and take late night drives to anywhere. We would watch movies, eat chinese, and share our lives desires and secrets. Random adventures that brought a smile to my face and that dimple to his became our way of passing time. The adventures we embarked on didn’t seem all that memorable but they still linger with me to this day

After a few months we started to date. I tried to keep control of him and my heart. I assumed that if I could control one the other would follow suit. I pretended for a few months that I could contain my feelings. Now looking back and wanting to romanticize everything it seems so perfect. Sitting in my best friends bedroom where he told me he loved me for the first time meant more to me then even I knew at that point in time. There where no ayah inspired life altering words that came to me then or even now. I knew the first moment I say that nineteen year old in his black shirt and jeans what it was to love. We were two naive adolescents who continued to fall and break each others hearts for sometime. That boy who made my world shine so bright when he was around never could quit figure out just what he did want and I was to frozen by fear to ever show him what he meant.

I will carry the day he broke my unbreakable heart in a million pieces with me as I do the entirety of the time I got to know him. He fell in love with someone else and shattered my world before being deployed. He stood there on a humid southeastern night and told me he wanted someone else, someone to me who seemed so wrong. Couldn't he see I was his soulmate couldn't he see that the lack of emotion I wore on face was only a facade? We stayed up all night and argued and I replayed the last moment I got to hold him over and over again in my head. It didn’t matter that I had a full day of living my dream ahead of me the next day all that mattered was that he wouldn’t be there when I came home. The next morning causalities where exchanged and just like that the boy that turned my world upside down walked out of the same apartment doorway he walked in through.

He left about a month later and there wasn't a day I didn't feel for him, sometimes anger, others regret. We became friends later and I have stood by him like I had promised, but my heart misses him still. I do believe that it has something to do with that original meeting and knowing that this boy, who has somewhere along the line became a man, would forever change me. I wish now I could tell him thank you for making me feel the good and ugly. It was the first time I felt, alive, hope, anything in quite some time and whenever I stubble upon something that reminds me of him I feel it all over again.