The Man I Never Cried Over

I've cried over many boys in my life, each one taught me a hard lesson to make it easier to know how to love and to be loved.

I used to blush and gush over the boys that I looked at in my adolescence and daydream about what would never be. The boys I did go out with didn't appreciate me in my sophomore year of high school. After the hurt happened, my heart knew how to handle it.

Then I met this man where all the checkboxes on my list were marked, but this was the lesson that you can have someone that has those checks and not check out in the end. This was the lesson that tested me for cruelty more than being crushed by a crush.

I was 16 years old, I was at the age that I was ready to fall in love, but I was careful about who I fell in love with. I knew to not have a crush on someone for the sake of just having someone.

I was at a local anime convention and I spotted this man that didn’t look like any of the fictional crushes that I had, but he didn’t feel like he wasn’t an un-achievable suiter. I approached him, and I was surprised that we got along as if we have known each other our whole lives. It’s the moment that everyone waits for, and you enjoy the moment without thinking about the future and just thinking of the present.

However, in every story, there’s always going to be a hurdle. That hurdle came in the shape and form of an estranged friend. This friend of mine won't have a name, but I'll call him Boy.

Boy became the friend of my crush on the same weekend of the convention.

Boy and I had a hard time in our early school days, it was us against the world, and relied upon each other when cruel our classmates would target us. Over the years, his personality and morality changed. I thought he had been broken by the brutality of our classmates. I wasn't sure why he changed, I didn't understand it and I stopped wasting my time with what I couldn't change. I kept my distance within an arm's length of friendship. He didn’t do anything to me, he was just being someone that I did not prefer to be around.

And then, after the convention, I got to talking with this crush that I was smitten with, and for almost two months we talked nonstop. It was the moments of bliss that I finally got to have in my teenage days. To meet a man, he was like forbidden fruit to be around someone that did not go to my high school and someone that was an adult, but it didn’t feel like it was a far-fetched attraction with him being a few years older than me.

In the last days of 2011, he was leaving for military training. He would be away for three months and it made me sad to count down the days that I wouldn’t be able to talk to him.

On the last day before he left, he told me that when I get back, let's see about a relationship. We were both thinking the same thing that a relationship is going to happen.

Three months went by very quickly and soon he was back home, and something changed

I texted him the same way the day I met him and every day after that, just being myself, and in return, I got one word text messages, or barely any contact at all. I had known that I did not do anything wrong, but something was going on.

One day during English class, my friend, Boy showed me a video of my crush in a vehicle that they looked at the day my crush got back. Boy seemed too happy that my crush was back. Something didn't seem right that Boy and my crush were talking so much and I wasn't getting the communication with my crush. People are finicky and have established rapports with each other, but my gut told me something was up.

A few weeks later, Boy approached me and said, “oh by the way, he doesn’t wanna talk to you anymore.”

I sat there silent and stern as it all came together. My suspicions were correct that my friend, Boy had sabotaged a possible relationship because I was close with someone that he wanted to be and he had to take me out of the equation

He didn't have to do that to me, but he did.

I joke and say that I cry so much I could drown the titanic twice, but I didn’t cry over this. That surprised me since my last relationship had me in tears because a boy I loved did not love me back.

This wasn’t love, it was just a gradual fling that never got to become love, and it spared me from being hurt.

I was disappointed, though, I was disappointed that the crush I liked, did not get my side of things, and only let my friend dictate his thoughts and feelings. It showed that he wasn’t worth my time to pursue a relationship with him. In a strange way of praise, because Boy sabotaged the fling, it did save me from being hurt.

But the fault also lies with Boy, that it cleared up that he and I were no longer the friends that we used to be when we would comfort each other in elementary school, and he became the person I did not like at all. For him to stoop to a level showed me his true character.

It was a disappointing time in high school when I got another lesson in relationships, a crash course, in the changing of characters of friends, and being careful about who I would encounter next, they just became the first of many.

I did get one piece of comfort from it the shortlived romance and the ending of a friendship.

Sometimes the trash takes itself out.