I was 14 years old. A lonely Runescape playing Ohioan with no friends. We were visiting family in Michigan, a yearly trip. My cousins and I had a lot in common, video game nerds and such. My aunt had a picture on the refrigerator of my cousins and their friends at a basketball game, seated, enjoying the game. A girl in the photo caught my attention, and she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. I kept that image in my mind, wondering who she was, what kinds of things she liked, what kind of person she was. I had the image of this girl in my mind for a year, it was something of an obsession. The following year, headed back for the same yearly visit, I find out that my aunt's family have moved to a different house. We get there, it's a nicer place than their last one. My aunt's husband works for a huge corporation, makes a lot of money, so it's no surprise. We arrive, and when I go to the basement to greet my cousins, the girl from the photo is there. I feel my heart flutter. How could I be so lucky? The house my aunt's family moved into was next door to the family of the girl from the photo. Being a nobody at my school, I don't even try to talk to her directly. I pretend she's just some girl who's getting in the way of my time with my cousins. I'm secretly in love with a person who's right next to me, playing Super Smash Bros. Melee, and she beats me. Time after time, she wins. As a 15 year old whose life was defined by his video game prowess, this was devastating, but since it was her, it was utterly invigorating. Sunday, early afternoon, we're about to head home, when she comes over to give me a slip of paper. Her Runescape username. As a hopeless 15 year old with no friends, she may as well have proposed marriage. I get home and add her, she's online. We start talking, realize how much we have in common, and it feels like fate. Formerly an obsessive RS player who couldn't be bothered by people, I found myself only logging on to wait for her. A few weeks after we met, she tells me she has a crush on me. I tell her I'd felt the same since before she'd even met me. I tell her anout seeing her picture and that I thought she was beautiful a year before she even knew I existed. A month later, she tells me she loves me. This was the first time I ever experienced this. After about 8 months of talking about every detail of every day, she asks a question . "Is it okay if I like somebody else from my school?" I tell her I understand. She lives 5 hours away. What did I expect? Obviously, I was devastated. Nobody cared about me, then somebody did, then nobody did again. I was depressed and withdrawn from the world completely for months. Talked to nobody. Nothing had any meaning. Eventually, spring came back around. Springtime was when we visited up there. She hadn't logged on to RS since she told me she liked someone else, and I hadn't in over two months myself. The Friday afternoon we arrived, I was all hopeful to see her and reconcile with her, even though we hadn't talked in months, to find out her family was on a trip that weekend. They left a half hour before we arrived. "Well, fuck." I thought. "End of the road." Still, that Sunday night, we got home around 7 and I logged on to Runescape. There she was. I felt intense joy that she was there, knew that she was there to tell me something, but... just then, it occurred to me. This could never be. I had waited 5 hours in the car with the suspicion that she might be online when I got home, thinking she would have something to say, and when I got there and saw her username online, I quickly logged back out, before she could say anything. I couldn't hear her out. I was 16, and had spent 2 years in love with a girl I saw in a photograph. It sounds insane now, but it still hurts me to the core. It's been 12 years since I saw her, but every once in a while, like today, something will remind me of that time of my life and I'll think of her. I'll wonder what she's doing, if she's struggling like I am, or if she ever wonders the same about me. I wonder if she'd still want to tell me what she wanted to tell me that day. I don't know if she ever thought as highly of our relationship as I did, but I'll never forget her. None of my friends or family even knew that our little online relationship ever existed, and I'll never tell anybody. Nobody but you, reddit.
Thanks for reading.
Submitted March 17, 2017 at 04:14PM by SaveMeTheSlunk http://ift.tt/2nM7FlY offmychest
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