Part 3. - Once Upon a Time, My First Love Story.

"Don't you think it's better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?" - Clare Abshire, The Time Travelers Wife

As you may have noticed from my last post, this time around i've chosen to change names to protect peoples identities. I don't really want to use this blog to bad mouth anyone, but to tell this story some people need and honorary mention. Whether it's because they did something that made me sad or something that made me happy. I try not regret anything in my life, as Jonathon Larson so aptly puts it in his Broadway hit, Rent "forget regret, or life is yours to miss." After I made the decision to finally call it a day in my relationship with Mr BFG, this was something I clung to for dear life. I was unhappy, I was wasting my precious life and what if in 10, 15, 20 years time, I realised I'd wasted my life on someone who didn't want to spend theirs with me? Life is too short to be unhappy, to not do what you want to do.

Once again, I'm on a tangent of what this entry was supposed to be about. To really understand things, to understand the relationships behind the nicknames, I have to go back to the beginning, to the one I so fondly call my first love, Mr Wrong Place, Wrong Time.

I could begin this story with the old "Once Upon a Time" because it works. I'm lucky enough to be able to think of my first love as a fairytale. Some days I even wake up and that's what it feels like it was. Sometimes I wish for a split second it was. It doesn't really have a happy ending, but it's an ending I can be content with.

I was fifteen years old. As I've mentioned before at fifteen I was a no one special sort of girl. I didn't wear make up, I had braces and blonde hair. I was short for my age and skinny, I looked like a little girl, but then again I'm twenty two and I still get asked for ID.. somethings never change. I was a goody two shoes in school, I had a few close friends but I was bullied a lot by the popular kids. I'd never been kissed yet my little sister was dating the popular boys in my year. It stung, and caused me to have little self esteem. Then I met a boy. He was older than me and in college. He was the nicest guy, everyone said so. We connected and talked all the time. I used to eat lunch at home just so I could speak to him. I used to skip classes. I was crazy about him. He promised me the world.

After a few months I found out his parents intended for him to not return for a second year at college and instead join the army. This devistated myself and him. We were both afraid. This was back in the beginning of the Iraq war, before Saddam Hussain was found. I was young, naive, afraid. I remember the day he had to leave college and return home, I knew it was now going to be mere days before he would be attending Boot Camp for training. As I've mentioned before that day I cried all day in my room, I even remember the t-shirt I was wearing that day. He wrote me a few letters, telling me to move on with my life, that he was sorry that I had to go through this. But then they stopped one day, I never heard from him again. I was in pieces but he was right, my friends were right, I was young, I was only sixteen.

I went away to college myself. I started to live my life. I met other guys. I kept his letters and his emails for years but eventually I took the plunge and got rid of them all. I stopped hoping one day I'd open my door and he'd be standing there because life doesn't happen like that. He'll probably be married now, have a family. He wanted all those things. But I was so young. This is why he's Mr Wrong Time, Wrong Place. If I'd been older I know I could of stopped him going. If I'd met him now we could of been together, I'm an adult now and I can make those decisions. But at fifteen/sixteen.. you just can't. You're just a child. He'd be twenty five now. I hope he's happy, it's all I'd ever hope for the guy who stopped me giving up on love.. hope stopped me starving myself in a vain attempt to get guys to notice me, to try and make myself be more attactive.

B still often asks when we're discussing "happily ever after" (as we often do when we're together and especially after a few glasses of wine) what i'd do if one day we did cross paths again. My first instinct is "I'd marry him", but then I have to think again.

What i'm most thankful for with Mr Wrong Time, Wrong Place, is the fact that in my head I have this perfect untainted memory of us. Yes in the end, I lost him. I was left broken but it wasn't through lack of trying or through anything either of us did, it was just bad circumstances. For a few months of my life I got to be in a real fairytale. I got the romance, I was swept off my feet. We never got to truely be together, it was never ruined, nothing can damage that. I'm thankful that my first love was truely perfect in so many ways. Not many people get to say that they had that.