Love is stronger than pride

Boys that I like don't grow on trees (I've never been a fan of the Tarzan-types)

This post will be rather silly.



Once upon a time, a girl was invited to a dinner with some old acquaintances, maybe friends isn't the appropriate word since they rarely saw each other. She didn't feel like going because she hadn't seen them for a long time and she didn't know if they'd have anything to talk about. But she had to go and so she went, after a long day when she'd done a dreadful exam that she was sure she was going to fail. There was someone in the dinner that she especially wasn't looking forward to seeing, someone that had made her knees weak in a long faded summer.


But it wasn't as bad as she had anticipated. There were more people at the dinner than she expected and she soon started chatting to them, particularly a girl that seemed even more nervous than she was. She tried to act naturally around those people she hadn't seen in a while and she felt she was doing okay. They were all very nice and she was very fond of them, even though she thought she had little to say.


When it was time to sit at the table, she sat next to the boy of her past, like they had done in that Summer and he was still very quiet and talked to her in a friendly manner, while making sure she had everything she needed. But suddenly, in the course of dinner, her focus changed entirely. Someone was trying to include the other shy girl in the conversation, asking her if she didn't think a particular boy was good-looking, creating embarrassed looks between some of those sat at the table, while the boy in question blushed visibly. Our girl looked up to the boy in question, who was sitting more or less in front of her and she saw that not only was he good-looking but he was completely enchanting. And, from that moment on, as fickle was she was, she couldn't take her eyes off of him for the rest of the night and completely forgot about the boy sitting next to her, who probably couldn't care less about her either.


She commented to the boy that he was becoming the colour of his shirt (he was wearing something red) and he replied he could get even redder, which she thought was particularly sweet.


He didn't have to say or do anything special from then on because she was already smitten, but she noticed how polite he was, how he always said her name when addressing her, which made a nice change from most people. After dinner, some of them sat on the floor with pillows and chatted. The girl didn't talk much, she just laughed, as she usually did when she was with those people she already knew from the summers. One of them was particularly funny. She paid close attention to the boy, to a curl that fell on top of his forehead, trying to understand what colour were those eyes. She felt good and she started to wish that she was a part of that group regularly.


As the night draw to a close, she worried that unless something extraordinary happened she wasn't likely to see the boy again in the near future. Nothing extraordinary happened and soon she had to leave. The boy stayed. She'd had no way to talking to him alone, nor did she know what she could say to someone she'd just met.


She felt the excitement of meeting someone new that she could really like and simultaneously a sadness, as though she had already lost him. In the following days, she looked for ways to contact him but nothing worked out. She couldn't contact the others either: she knew they were no more than acquaintances, nice fun ones, but just that.


The girl never saw the boy again and gradually she forgot about him. She had to, what choice did she have? What did people do when they met someone in these circumstances? Yeah, go for it. That would've been interesting, right there, next to all those people she knew. She didn't risk it but she didn't regret it. It was one of those things she had to let go of.


Recently, the girl found the boy in one of those Internet communities. A tiny part of her wanted to send him a message saying 'hi', but she knew that something that was ridiculous years ago, would be utterly unthinkable at the present moment. She will let go again, knowing that she doesn't fall for someone who blushes everyday, but because she has a lot of important things to think about.

[Edit: FB commented that this reminded him of something japanese writer Murakami wrote and it's true! It's a short story that you can read over here and there's a line that sums it up very well - "Oh, well. It would have started "Once upon a time" and ended "A sad story, don't you think?"" But read mine first!! lol]