My story:

There are some things in life that you wish you had never done. Some things that, if only you could go back in time, you could change, and everything would be alright. And it’s okay, because most of those things can be worked out. All it takes is the courage to confront what everyone fears the most: the fact that you just screwed up, and there’s nothing more to it.

However, there are some things that certain people just cannot fix- no matter how hard they dry or how strong of mind they are. Some people only make matters worse when they follow their harts. Some people continue to make the same mistakes over, and over, and over again, their entire lives. Such is the case with me, I am afraid.

I have screwed up a lot in my life. Starting around the age of seven, in elementary school, when all the sudden I was no longer considered smarter than everyone else in the class. The students were now considered to be equal, something I had yet to learn. So now, all of a sudden, I was lagging behind everyone in my class, instead of a grade ahead of them, and this affected my entire outlook on life.

It was my stubbornness that got me. I knew I was smarter than them! Just looking around me, I found flaws in every individual in the class; flaws I had long since overcome. I was more mature, more talented, better in almost every way, not to mention, I looked older, too. But it was their maturity level that made them go forward in life. They did their homework for the sake of doing homework: merely because a teacher told them to. I only did my work if I didn’t know it already; after all, any restatement of what I already learned, something already committed to my memory as common sense, was pointless to exercize, was it not?

This continued until my junior year of high school. Hell, that was the year my life just went spiraling down, and after crashing, started anew. And this is the year that relates to my beginning.

At the beginning of the story, I mentioned that here are some things that everyone wishes that you could just go back and change. Everyone has those moments when you think about it and realize that, if you could change a series of events, your whole life would be different. And it may have been in my junior year of high school that I wished I hadn’t done things, but it was my sophomore year, when I was fifteen and sixteen, that the events started happening; and these things I wish had never happened controlled my life for the next 6 years.

I had just gotten out of a miniscule relationship with a boy in my grade, who, unfortunately, did not know what having a girlfriend meant. Dating him was horrible, if you could really call it dating. I think he took me to a movie once. That was all. But the reason I broke up with him was not because he wasn’t a good boyfriend, or the fact that in the two months we had been ‘dating’, we had never kissed. It was because I found out that I started liking someone else.

This guy was kind of shy, strong, handsome, atheletic, funny. The perfect man, and I guess it started when I was in Hawaii and had a dream that I ran into him at a nude beach.

So, I broke up with the first guy, and gathered up the courage to ask the next to Sadies. Sadie Hawkins dance, the one dance that girls usually just want to have fun, but they (the males) think that we want sex. For me, though, I liked him a lot, and he just didn’t know about it yet.

Well, I got an answer from him the following Monday. He was so sweet when he approached me, because I think he wasn’t so sure of what to do with himself. He said that he already agreed to go with another girl, and immediately my heart sank. “Oh, no,” I thought, “He likes someone else… or someone else likes him…” But my fears were for naught. The next moment, he apologized, and said that he could hopefully make it up to me by taking me up to the mountains skiing that weekend. Every day I grew more and more fond of him, but I don’t know if anyone could say something would have happened if he didn’t, the next week, unexpedly say, “Yes.”

Things went so smoothly the first month, we didn’t even know it passed by. But something went on for weeks, where my mind… I was scared. I was scared because never in my life had I had feelings like what was going on right then, and and the main thought that was going on in my mind was, “What would happen if I lose it all?” I loved him, and he loved me, but I was too afraid to go anywhere in a relationship, because I loved him TOO much. So the first time we kissed was maybe a month and a half after the dance, after many dates and many shared feelings, when I thought I would seriously spend the rest of my life with this person.

Five months later, or six weeks into summer break, or however you choose to refer to it, I went to Spain on an immersion program. I was to spend four weeks there, living with a Spanish family and fellow immersion students (who were supposed to be from all around the United States, but a good majority of them were from the same general area, in a county on the other side of the San Francisco Bay). Before leaving, I slaved to make a project for my boyfriend; something to keep him thinking about me while I was gone. I was surprised when he did the same thing, hiding little pieces of paper in my luggage with one word on each of them, and a number, so that when I had collected all of them, they would spell out a poem that he wrote himself. He was a talented writer, indeed.

In Spain, I had a lot of fun. At first it was a little strange, because the only person I knew was one of my classmates from school back at home. I made friends quickly, though. What was interesting was, out of a group of about 25 students, there were only two boys. Naturally, both my friend and I made friends with them. And even though everyday, I found something that reminded me of my love back at home, I found myself being strangely drawn to this new person, who I saw everyday in Spain. He was so… different from the person I loved back home. He drank, did drugs, partied, wasn’t extremely atheletic. But he did have looks. Just something completely opposite from what I used to call “perfect”.

I managed just to flirt with him until I got back home. Then things started to get strange. I found myself stuck. I had the guy I had loved for six months now. He was still the same sweet, loving boy as when I left. But I was the one that changed. For another month, I stayed a little bit away from him, and started going to spain reunions, where I spent most of my time with my Spain crush.

Then, on a rafting trip with the guy I still considered to be my boyfriend, I started giving him hints that I wanted to break up with him. But every time I did, I kept remembering how much I really did love him. It was confusing; in the morning, I would try to be hiding my tears, but by the nightfall, I wanted him so bad, like yet again there was nothing else in the world that mattered.

We decided to see what would happen if we took a “break”. To him, it meant I wanted some time to think things over. To me, it meant I could see my Spanish fling without guilt. Eventually, I went on an actual date with him, and things were suddenly over with a man I wasn’t sure I didn’t still love.

But things happened between us. As I grew closer to my Spain boyfriend, my old boyfriend, whom I still considered to be a close friend, grew farther apart from me. But I didn’t want to like him again. I guess, in a way, he was a liability- someone to fall back to if things didn’t go the right way with my new love. Eventually, one of the only reasons I still hung out with him was because of the fact that he still loved me, and would do anything I asked.

He eventually got tired of me treating him this way, and after a couple of tear-filled fights, we have never spoken since. He was a little rash, and did some dick thing that made it so that, for a long while, I didn’t miss him.

I never forgave him for that, although I never really gave him the chance to apologize. For so long in my relationship with my Spain boyfriend I kept wondering if I was making the biggest mistake of my life. For six whole months, without the slightest cease, I sincerely loved a man- and for several weeks after, I still loved him. I could have waited a couple months, a couple years, even, and I would have married him, and probably been happy for the rest of my years with him. But I didn’t. Four months after dating my Spain fling, we broke up, and for the first time in my dating life, I had nobody to turn to. I was never able to talk to the person I loved, who I see in my office across the hall at work everyday, wishing a series of mistakes had never taken place.

You never really realize that you screwed up until you find that it’s too late to take it back, love.