I was eighteen years old when I met him. Living in a small town, I had seen him around, but never had the opportunity to meet him. Our first conversation took place at my workplace, but being in a professional setting, our conversation was confined to business and impersonal comments designed to make customers feel more at ease. I was drawn to him from the very beginning. There was something in him that was attractive to me although he went against every physical attribute that I had always considered good looking. He was handsome, he was charming. I wanted to spend more time with this man, I wanted to learn more about him. Finally, an opportunity presented itself one night when I went to the local library and discovered him there as well. Having already established names from our previous meeting at work, our conversation easily carried into more personal things. We spent hours at the library talking with one another and a girlfriend of mine who had shown up. We talked about God and in a single night a bond was established between the three of us.
From then on the three of us spent almost every day together. It was a frenzy of lunches, dinners, late night talks about God, trips out of town for the day, campfires, and coffee dates. We became the "Three Musketeers", joined together in a instantaneous friendship that was considered an exclusive group to those looking in from the outside. The girlfriend and I spent our own time together discussing which of us this man had feelings for. It was a mystery. We could never figure out which woman he had an interest in and many times we gave up analyzing the situation, determining that he didn't have strong feelings for either one us of us and was simply looking for friendship.
This continued on for a year before things began to change. My girlfriend began developing feelings for this man, and to my own shock, I found that my own feelings of friendship toward him were steadily moving in a romantic direction. Since he was twelve years older than me, I doubted that his feelings would be returned. I felt torn. I hid my own feelings for him from my best friend, moving aside, hoping that the two of them would come together. After all, he was the best man either one of us had met and I would have been happy to see her joined together with such a strong, godly man. But, if he had deeper feelings for either of us, he kept them hidden. It did seem that perhaps he had stronger feelings for me. He brought me coffee at work almost every day. He brought me snacks as well. But, even with these gifts (which from any other man I would have interpreted as interest) he still kept a distance from me which confused everyone about his true feelings. But, like every other thing in life, his true feelings eventually came out.
We kissed each other.
I remember that night vividly. A group of friends had gotten together at a place he was house-sittting and we all ended up crashing out there. I couldn't sleep. I went downstairs to have a cigarette, and found him awake, sitting on the couch. I sat next to him and when I explained that I couldn't sleep he put his arms around me, laid my head on his chest and tried to relax me into falling asleep. Then it began. I could feel the tension rising in the moment when he began to gently rub my arms, giving me goosebumps all over. We both gave in and kissed each other.
What I remember most of all was the sinking feeling in my stomach the moment he laid his lips on mine. The intensity behind his kiss gave me the feeling that he had finally discovered a woman he could love. Being only nineteen years old at the time, I was terrified. My feelings were that of a crush, while his seemed to carry the intensity of a man who was steadily falling in love.
I felt guilt at betraying my friend's feelings for him. I felt terrified by his depth of feelings. I felt drunk with the excitement and fear of being with him. And I masked the rush of feelings and pretended to be happy only to be with him. But inside, I was terrified. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know how to backtrack. Since I saw no way out of the situation I had just created, I ran with it. I threw myself into making it work.
And because of that single decision, two years of love, hardship, heartbreak, and loss followed.
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