Chapter 4

     We listened to a lot of Boys Like Girls. Anything else I have a hard time remembering. It's really odd to me, the way my mind decides what to remember and what not to remember. For instance I can't really remember what Her and I used to listen to but I can remember the first time I read Pride and Prejudice which was two years prior to even meeting her. Going back again. When we did hang out, it was outside, on the steps, with a guitar and her perfect voice. She played to but I much preferred her voice to anything else. We wrote a couple of songs, Her and I, and when we played them together everything felt perfect. I remember how fast I walked to get to the band hall to see her - it wasn't fast enough. I would breathe fast and low when I saw her and when I hugged her it was never long enough. I stopped caring about anything else and even though I thought I cared for someone else, I was only ever in love with her. Then she introduced me to Ashly.

     Ashly was a sweet, pretty and tiny little thing. She was super Mexican and was part of drill team that performed with the band. I remember her as a girl whose love was perfect, but never enough for me. We met, thanks to her, in a bus on the way back from a competition in, if my memory serves, Ft. Worth. I was sitting by myself in a row of benches across the way from her and Vincent. She kept telling me to go sit next to her and all this jazz that I don't even remember because all I can remember was that I still couldn't believe that she was talking to me.

     At that point, after the remainder of the bus ride and the lingering goodbye we had that night as her parents picked her up, I now realize that I should have, then and there decided that I would not let her think we would be anything more than friends. I am soft, though, and my heart's desire is to make every single human being I know happy. So I didn't say anything, I just let her believe that not only did I sit next to her because I wanted to, but because I was still in awe of her.

     After that night we were together as often as we could help it and talked just the same. I don't remember where our friendship became something more, I'm not even sure we ever were just friends. That is one of the many curses I posses, that is to make a person, more specifically a girl, feel as if all I have inside me is so in love with that person that they want to marry me. What is unfortunate is that I never have the will to make that person see that, while I do indeed love them, and while I am as best I can, making them comfortable and feel good about themselves, I am not in a position to be depended on.

 My limited forms of communication (only a computer for about an hour a day) meant that I could not talk with Ashly very often while school was not in session. I remember Christmas break, I'm quite certain we did not talk for at least a week, mostly because any chance I got to talk to anyone outside of my family, I used it to talk to Briana. Therefor, as time went on, I lost interest in Ashly.

     She trusted me, though, unconditionally, and even when I bailed on her or obviously flirted and started at Briana, she still loved me. (She would later tell me that she was convinced beyond trust and love that I was her future.) At one point in time, Briana and Vincent broke up and I almost, immediately broke up with Ashly for Briana, but I thought better of that in order not to appear to be a huge asshole. Of course, though, as nature would have it, Vincent and Briana were back together before I could say, "Please, Please. Just one kiss is all I want." I was pathetic, really.