You guys all probably guessed what happened next. Yup, the following summer that 2010, after some months of getting over my last relationship, I was getting myself attracted to "The Girl" all over again. I suppose for a lot of people, that inherent attraction never really goes away completely; you liked them for reasons before, why would that change if the same qualities are still there and still attractive to you, right? But just the way it was all going, I felt like I had to give it a shot. Driving her home after getting back into town from Penny Arcade Expo, I asked her if she was seeing anyone. Nothing serious, just finding myself attracted to someone again and wanting to see if it's something we could consider.
Well, she freaked out a little bit to say the least. And after some time regaining her composure, she said something that would evidently kinda haunt me for the next few years:
"You have terrible timing. If you had asked me a month and a half earlier..."
She had just started dating her closest guy friend of the past many years. He had been asking for a very long time and she had actually been holding off for a while because she was still sorting out her feelings for me. But in the end, she found herself in a similar place I had: she was in her mid-20s, she had someone very compatible in personality with her, and it was something worth giving a shot.
Of course, what I took from it was that she was giving her friend a go and that she had logically chosen compatibility to overrule attraction or what have you. With all these things in my head, I simply couldn't give up. She didn't love him that way, I told myself. There is still an attraction there whether she is willing to say it out loud or not. There's no way this story can end on this note...
For the next three years this went on. Phases of us getting along alright, of us getting along very well and very close to the point that other people actually thought we we're dating. Cosplay groups grew, and Diablo 3 was played (and yes, the girl in that story was indeed "The Girl"). But don't get me wrong, there were plenty of phases of us getting into stupid fights and myself getting into more than a little trouble with her for being... inappropriate. At the start of this all, many of my friends supported me and my romantic notion of that one true love. After a couple years of it starting to negatively affect the group as a whole... not so much after that. Some friends were far more vocal in my need to move on and to stop being so touchy and flirty with someone who was in a committed relationship.
Last year, even after I had told myself I was going to let go, I still really couldn't quite do it. I had that last big talk with her, laying it all down, telling her that I thought we would be so good together, that a relationship can't work if you don't have the compatibility and emotion to go with it... I told her I loved her, something I had never done in all the previous twelve, thirteen years of this whole story.
But it couldn't happen that way. She wasn't about to end a relationship on grounds outside that very relationship not working. So after hours of going back and forth, I finally relented. I said okay. I said I would move on...
...and a few months after that (and after getting myself into even more trouble with all of my friends), I actually did. So this would have been last... October, or so?
I closed the book on the thirteen-year story that I had been writing on and off since before I was an adult.
