Memories are really our best form of time travel

Do you ever just catch yourself and thinking about what life would be like if you were still with your first boyfriend/girlfriend, or first crush, first time, or maybe the one that got away? I do. All the time, but the thing with me is that I was so wrapped up in my own world when I was young that I had a lot of “ones that got away” because I couldn’t see how much of a bitch I was to anyone who came close to me. I had great boyfriends that would “like just dump me for no reason” but clearly it wasn’t for no reason, it was because of how terrible I was to them. I remember my first real boy friend in high school. (I wont say his, or any other name because I am not sure how many of my high school friends read this and no one needs a blast) This guy was a sweet heart. Really sweet guy, but for whatever reason I didn’t like him. As a matter of fact I would openly make fun of him for liking me. After he asked me out for the third time, my friends begged me to take pitty on him and at least give him a chance; after all, he really was a great guy. I on the other hand, liked his best friend (of course man it was high school, there’s got to be a love triangle) who coincidentally was going out with one of my friends. So being as clever as I thought I gave in to dating the sweet best friend so I could participate in fun high school double dates stuff. Really it meant hanging out after school, playing guitar, and listening to music. I was still being a total douche though to the sweet friend. I know I pretended I didn’t kiss boys though so I wouldn’t have to kiss him. Secretly though I had started to like him. Too little, to late though, he got wise to me and broke it off. I deserved it for how I treated him, but I had started to like him, too little too late. When he broke up with me he immediately started dating another girl who was never too fond of me, but that he liked very much and who was sweet to him. I lost any chance of ever getting him back. Today is his birthday which is what sparked this blog of mine.

Every once in a while, I get really pensive about my life and I just think back to everything that has happened. When the sweet friends picture popped up on social media for it being his birthday, I started looking through his Facebook to see what he was up to these days. We’ve all done it, looked through high school friends profiles that we haven’t seen in a while.

The first guy I ever really had a crush on was in middle school. I met him at first when his best friend was dating mine in 7^th grade. It was brief and I didn’t like his best friend who was dating mine. I thought my best friend should break up with him. I met him again on my bus in 8^th grade. He was a flirt for sure, and nothing like his best friend who was still dating my best friend. We rode the bus every day we became pretty ok friends, but the kind of friends who had to bicker in public to defend our best friends who were a terrible couple. Now my best friend and her boyfriend (lets call him B1) catch on to the friendship between myself and the other best friend (B2) and they don’t like it. So B1, tells B2 lots of mean things about me while my best friend tells me lots of mean things about B2, so that we don’t like each other anymore. In high school B2 left us and went to a different school, but I never forgot him. A few years after high school we met up again as friends. I immediately had a crush again. We talked about how we had met in middle school. I found out about how B1 had told him to stay away from me and how our friendship had been sabotaged. We suggested the possibility of dating now. Unfortunately I had to move, almost immediately after we met again and so nothing ever happened to the evolution of our friendship.  We are both now engaged and he’s getting a stepchild.

That story wasn’t one where I was really mean to anyone, but I was heavily influenced by my apparently wicked (totally kidding, there are no hard feelings) best friend who did want me dating her boyfriends best friend. There are really only 2 other people worth mentioning. The next person to get a story is the first person I fell in love with. And the terrible awful no good thing I did to him. I was a very stupid little girl who fell in love with someone who was in a relationship. Now lucky for me, I made this mistake while I was young and in high school, and the not older, destroying a marriage or learning my lesson would have been much harder. This guy I fell in love with was in a relationship of 4-5 years, so you know it was marriage level serious to us high-schoolers (honestly its impressive to me as an adult too, have you seen how people date today…)  and I started talking to a guy, who was awesome. Seriously everything I had ever wanted in a person. He was kind and compassionate, at one point he helped me find a place to work and live, just and overall great guy who would do anything for his family and friends. Down side was that he was with another girl. She wasn’t in our grade nor did she  live near us, so most of the time people became used to seeing my crush (call him C) and me together like a couple. One night he and a couple of his buddies, invited me and my friend to come hang out with them, and this other girl tagged along with us. Well this other girl was drunk and all over C. So I was heated. All of a sudden the two of them left the room while no one noticed and I was pissed (little did I know that he was being a gentleman and taking her to the bathroom to puke, found that one out years later) so I went to his best friend and hooked up with him, in front of everyone, even though I was at the party with C. Needless to say my friend and I left the party and the next day C plead his case to me, but I didn’t believe him. I pinned the kiss entirely on him and made him feel like it was his fault. Told him to break up with his girlfriend or I would never speak to him again. After that I moved to another school in another state and so even though I made an ass of him at the party and he broke up with his girlfriend for me, I left him. I called him a few years later when I came back to our home state and he was still mad at me. I used to imagine my with him a lot. As kids we had talked about how our lives could be when we were older, but being older and looking back in a-whole-nother thing.

The last person to get a story was a short relationship. Its not the he’s super special to me, but he was the first decent boy I had dated since the sweet best friend in high school. He was actually the first person I had dated in a very long time, since I was recently a single mom. He was the first guy who met my child and who I felt I could trust around her. Unfortunately for me I was in the throws of my addiction during this time. It was during a point when I thought I had things under control, because I had a great job and was looking to move and buy a house, but honestly I was a mess. One day He just stopped texting me, stopped answering my phone calls. I wanted to say I didn’t know why, and that I had done nothing wrong, but really I did. When we would go out with friends I would always get trashed and expect him to just take care of me.  I even left drugs at his house and let him take the blame for me. He was almost kicked out of where he lived. I would have stopped talking to me to.  I thought about him a lot when I first got clean. I wondered if things would have been different if I had stopped a year or two sooner.

All of these men have made an impact on my life, along with a few other of people I fantasized about having kept in my life, some of them were long and drawn out of the period of almost a decade. I new I was finally over all of these guys when I would try to imagine a different life than the one I had and I wouldn’t want to. This was my sign that I was over any crush, or ones that got away and that I was ready to commit fully to my current fiancé. Who I should think I have been good to. I know that from taking the time to reflect on my mistakes of the past I know things not to do, and we've got no complaints yet (fingers crossed).  This was really just a reflection of my life and the people who have moved through it.    Memories are really our best form of time travel.