Dear Ashleigh,
In about four years, you're going to realize that boys are the most desirable things on earth. At first, this will make you very happy. You'll tell someone which boy you want and the resulting humiliation will result in wanting to keep every boy a secret indefinitely. You will be twenty years old someday and still feel like this. It'll be a curse.
When you're thirteen, you'll begin to realize that everybody is coupling off, and you'll fall "in love" with someone who ends up being your best friend. This "love" will last four years before you realize that this boy is the last person you'd ever really want to date, or marry, or even kiss, because EW. That is your best friend, and that is all. You'll start writing your name as "Ashlie" because it makes you more interesting.
Freshman year, you'll meet a total loser scumbag who is just the best thing on the planet and the only one for you - even if he's three years older than you and has not just a criminal history, but a criminal history in sexual assault. Way to pick a winner. He'll be your first kiss and you'll be confused and think you love him. You don't love him. After your freshman year you'll never see him again, except for that time at Disneyland sophomore year where you could've sworn that was him.
Throughout high school, you'll only ever have a "boyfriend" for a couple weeks at a time. There will be very few of them. You'll become a hopeless romantic who believes every crush is "the one" that's going to at least last a couple months. You will only kiss two of them. You'll kiss one more boy you never actually date your senior year of high school - and he'll be a sophomore (who you nickname "eleven" with a close friend) who doesn't know what he wants. But neither do you. You'll delude yourself into thinking that kissing someone is significantly important, a sign from love gods that this person is so important in your life you'll never forget them. You'll keep count of how many people you've kissed.
Two months before you graduate high school, you'll meet someone online. You'll fall in love. You'll maintain a long distance relationship through your first year of college and visit his home, and spend the money for him to visit yours. You will never get this money back. After a year of working out plans to be together forever, get married, and planning names of your children together, he will leave you for someone who lives in the city next door to his. He'll have sex with her and you'll learn he's bad at it because he doesn't like sex. You'll remain a virgin, always glad you didn't have sex with him.
A week later you'll get drunk for the first time in your life. You'll spend the summer making no money, getting trashed, and meeting people who you'll forget almost instantly. You kiss four more people who won't mean a thing. That best friend will leave for the military. Your other best friend is one of the four people you'll kiss - and it will be hot because he's supposed to be in this fucked up non relationship with your other "best friend" who is female. You will be that shitty friend.
You'll start your sophomore year of college with a dorm room and a roommate who will unconsciously help you realize how close you are to God. You'll realize you've been reaching for God for at least a year now after years of believing in "Love." You'll realize they're one in the same. Your roommate will introduce you to a boy who will date you in the most superficial relationship you've had to date. He'll do nice things for you because you're his "girlfriend." You're a title to him. When he breaks up with you you'll cry for three days, on your carpet.
You'll kiss someone who seems desirable and after you kiss him you'll realize he's kind of immature. You'll begin to feel like he's your little brother and it'll gross you out that you ever kissed him. You and your roommate will start going to Church and you'll fall in love with God and it will be the beginning of a glorious relationship but you still feel like God wants you to love somebody.
You'll be four months away from turning twenty and you'll meet a boy who's playing pool by himself in your dorm building. You'll play seven games with him and walk away smiling. He'll drunkenly knock on your door at two am and the next day you two will go on your first date. He'll be the eleventh person you kiss. In the weeks that follow you'll go on many dates and have drunken encounters and sober encounters and you'll wonder what will come of it. At the end of the school year you'll go on vacation and he'll graduate and leave for the summer - and he's not coming back to Fairbanks for graduate school.
He'll tell you incessantly that he misses you and you'll begin to believe in something more. You'll justify this boy as different because he's got just a strong a faith as you and because you're too happy to not believe. But there will be moments like this morning where he didn't say goodnight last night and you'll read too many thoughtcatalog articles and wake up bitter and accidentally cry a little bit.
You'll sit on the fact that you still don't know where this is going and realize that your heart may be in a little too deep and you'll write a letter to your five year old self, wishing she could read it and not wake up one day fifteen years later consciously giving her heart to a boy who isn't close enough to hold it.
Stay strong,
Love, Ashleigh.
No comments:
Post a Comment