Blog Therapy

To a young man I don't love,

When I saw you tonight, for the first time in five years I got a feeling that I did not expect. You smiled at me and said that you knew I would do great at my audition. Suddenly I was eighteen again.

I was not in love with you. I also did not so much love the "idea of you" but the idea of what you COULD be. I would look at you when you smiled warmly at me and see something that I didn't think anyone else saw. You were the most popular guy at school, good looking, funny and athletic. Every girl had a crush on you and every teacher fawned over you. You acted like a typical jock and were a cocky sarcastic jerk. You were lazy and took advantage of your popularity and status.

But every once in a while I would sit with you in class or on the bus and you would talk to me like you were a real person and I thought I somehow saw the real you. You had something in your eyes that went much deeper than all of this. I saw a potential for you to be something kinder, smarter, more interesting and thoughtful. I then romanticized the day that you would leave your crazy-controlfreak-abnoxious girlfriend and we would run away from Cayuga and all the stupid crap at CSS.

I confused this with love, but in reality it was just a romanticized ideal of your potential. I looked at how hurt you were when you lost your bestfriend and wanted you to be happy again. I looked at the path you were headed down and thought you could do better.

I am glad that even through my starry eyes and distorted adolescent notion of love... that I was right. Way to go.