Pep Rally

September 19

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My loose white sweatshirt hung gently across my shoulders. Brown curly hair spilled on my collar. I looked perfect and I’m looking for you.

Even though I’m convinced you haven’t had the time to bother watching some pep rally – you have organization meetings, overtime academic work, or some dinner out with your cool friends – still, I hoped I see you there. To see my new hair, to ask how I am, just to stare into your eyes as we talk is enough, actually. That was enough – just to see you.

I smiled and cheered happily and I remembered the last time I was at the cheerdance competition. It was with you. Back in the time when I was the only one you got. Now, I could only imagine you being some famous campus person, while I graduated anonymously. And I don’t even know how we got there, but we got a wide distance apart from each other. After three years of it, I’m still not used to not having you.

I was happy with my companion: my officemate who is bubbly and talkative. At least she ridded us of the silence, and I actually felt really giddy watching the performance. It felt like I was college again, then again I was college just five months ago.

I could only wish you were there during my graduation. We’d snap a photo like we did during our high school graduation. But five months ago I had a beautiful dress on and you weren’t there. Next year you would be dressed and honored and awarded and, well, you wouldn’t mind if I was even there.

Still, something in me hopes that I still matter to you the way you still mattered to me. This has got to be the real test of love. Not seeing each other, not having a faintest belief of ending up together, but a hope still alive although completely quiet. Something in me hopes that we will end up together anyway. No matter how different things have become and will be, somehow, somewhere, sometime, we will find each other and I would sigh in relief knowing that I hoped correctly.

In fact, this hope is so strong that I am convinced it will happen. That the moment will come when I would say, “I knew it all along” or “we’ve finally found it”, and you would smile with that old smile and wide-eyed the way you have never been wide-eyed and juvenile before. The way you were with me, before.

All of this is weird, and I’m sure nobody would understand my feelings perfectly. I still love you, and somehow I know I could not replace you, and nobody would come even an inch closer to you. I have loved you the way I have never loved anyone before. And I don’t even want to possess you. If you loved me back, it would be a real bonus, but my love for you has been in a pedestal and I don’t expect it back. I am perfectly content in savoring this secret, this tiny glow of a mix of memory and hope inside my chest. It is the purest, most unselfish thing I have ever felt. And for a moment, I never even cared if I deserve better than this. I love the unrequitedness as it is, because I loved you more.

Perhaps this is sounding too soft, but that is how I feel about you. I have met a lot of terrific guys: smart, heartthrobs, successful, good-looking, but nothing compares to you. You are great, but perhaps even if I found someone greater, I would still go back to my first love. Or my first heartbreak. It is the taste I would never cease to crave for, a memory I will carry with me to the grave and not erase. It was so eternal, this love, that the years that passed by of you not knowing it, never spoiled it or chipped even the smallest piece of it.

I haven’t even entertained the thought of what could have happened if I told you. That would be a different plane. Sometimes I think I wanted to keep things as is, because of the uncertainty that comes with a confession. As I’ve said, I was never obsessed with the idea that you could even take a second look at me again, so I don’t see the point.

I don’t think you completely are not aware of my love. Somehow you must have seen it in my eyes, my smile, the way everything I feel is so intense with you around. With the way I speak, the way I found something to connect with you, the way I avoided you only because I wanted to be so dangerously close. You can’t be that dense, that clueless.

And I do love you, if you ask me. I do, and denying it would be a lie. It’s just a simple truth, it’s like asking the sun if it’s hot. It didn’t tell you the degrees of its heat, the deadly ray it emits, but you feel it on your skin and you don’t have to be told. That’s how I feel about my love for you. It has always been there even if I don’t tell you. My silence is simply letting you have a choice. Perhaps the only condition I have is that you would come to love me on your own. I didn’t want to provoke you, seduce, entice, or anything to that effect. I wanted you to choose me because you loved me.

And I f you love me, I don’t care if it wasn’t as much as I have loved you. I have always been such a quitter when it comes to love. The slightest mistakes and I’m off. But this doesn’t seem to apply when I think about you. With you, you are free to make mistakes, you are free to hurt me, you are free to find something else, but I know that I would still love you, and you wouldn’t leave me anyway if we get to that level.

I love you for who you are, your imperfections and future mistakes. This cannot be blind, because I have seen it all, and it would not change whatever things I’ll see in the future. My love has endured silence, it would endure anything with you around.

Oh, it would be my greatest joy if we ended up together, even though I no longer think it is possible. Maybe someday we would find each other, and things would go smoothly. I would be able to say I love you, and you would be able to lay your heart for me, too. But where it would happen seems to be a distant world. Maybe my soul would find yours in the next. And I’m sorry for my previous soul if I had failed her. But I wouldn’t abandon your freedom to choose with my impatience.

I love you, dear, and I forever would. Someday, I would like to call you my husband. While I wait for that time, in this life or the next, I would never cease loving you – in silence, in agony, in joy, in secret. My love will never change, my love will stay the same.