Once Upon A Memory

Chapter Five : Back To Reality

The next morning when I awoke my entire body was so sore, that I could hardly move at all. Kaitlin felt the exact same way, but despite the pain we both had enormous smiles upon our faces. We each had our own amount of fun last night.

"Good morning! Oh my gosh you should see your hair. It looks like we just had sex!" she screamed and was laughing. I laughed too, because she says the most random things, and even though they may sound dumb she is being brutally honest.

"Morning to you too! I'd rather have sex hair that have your hair. It looks like someone put a squirrel on you and it got lost on your head." I laughed. She gave me a confused look.

"You know, you don't make any sense when you wake up," she said and then laughed again which just happened to make me laugh more, because I knew that she was right.

I reached across my bed to my side table to get my phone to see that I had twelve new text messages. My eyes widened. TWELVE? That is a LOT for nine in the morning the day after prom. I checked to see that most of them were from a group message of photos that were taken during the dance. However, one was from Alex from a few hours ago. I opened that one and marked all of the others are read. I would look at the pictures later, but Alex was always the first person I wanted to talk to in the morning.

"You looked really nice last night, thank you for bringing me with you," it said, and it automatically made me smile. Does he happen to know the kind of effect that he has on me with just his words alone? I honestly thought that I looked like a mess last night, and he knew that too, but his words were really sweet.

The rest of the day consisted of Kaitlin and I drinking coffee, and watched cartoons on TV. It was quite a relaxing day for us to recuperate from the previous night, but one person was nagging on the back of my mind. One person who I knew never wanted to be more than just friends with me. The one person who had stolen my heart for months who I could not just seem to shake off. The one person I knew that I had to seperate myself from since the dance was over so that he could be with the woman of his choosing. I tried to ignore the thought of him for the entire day, and when he texted me I ignored it, or replied with little one word replies. It did not help that he was with his best friend who is like a brother to him. He acts differently when he is with him. He seems cold hearted, broken, and distant when he is around him.

Kaitlin and I have a ritual of talking to each other a lot about problems, stories, and relationship stuff while we are laying in bed trying to fall asleep. It seems to calm both of us down, and it helps to let everything that is on our mind off of it. Tonight in Erica and Kaitlin's dream talk we had one specific topic which had been on our minds for the entire day : Alex.

"Erica, I know for a fact that you and Alex are going to get together one day. I can just feel it. You know a gut feeling," Kaitlin said out of the blue.

"Kait, I don't think that is what it is meant to be, it is not meant to happen. I think that we're weren't meant for live with each other is all. We are just meant to be friends nothing more," I replied.

"Erica, we BOTH know that he wants you. He is just not man enough to come out and tell you, and he is not catching onto any of your signs, because he is scared. I saw the way that he was watching you last night, his face showed all signs of care and need. He just does not want to lose you just as much as you do not want to lose him. You are best friends, and that is how it starts. The best relationships come from being best friends, and then it progresses. It might take years, months, weeks, or even days for him to realize it, but he will. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but he will realize it," Kaitlin explained.

"I'm tired of waiting around for him to make up his mind Kait. He's just playing with my heart with every other girl he goes after. He's made it pretty clear that he doesn't want that type of relationship with me. I'm tired of getting broken so many times."

"Well maybe moving on is what is best for you to do right now. You can do so much better for now. He just needs to grow up before you can have any real type of relationship with him, and he needs to stop letting his friends tell him what to do, because that is not the way that he should be living his life. That's how he is going to ruin his life, by letting his friends dictate it for him. He should be making his own choices. It's okay to ask for advice once in a while, but do not let your friends control everything, including who you date." She ranted on and on, but in the end both of us felt better, and I did realize that it was time to move on from him. Being in love with him was unhealthy for me, and it is tearing me apart from the inside out over him, over the littlest things that he does. But not anymore, I am no longer going to let myself love him, because it will only end up in pain, and heartbreak.

I could not help that he was all that I thought about, and that he was all that I dreamed about at night in my sleep. In reality nothing was going to happen, I was just a memory waiting to be forgotten by him. He is just one of those guys who like to come up in my life and pretend to be my best friend for a while, and then once I fall for them extremely hard they disappear from my life like we never had any connection at all. It has only happened to me once before, but with a boy named Brandon.

Brandon used to be the sweetest boy that I knew, and he loved everyone. Our friend introduced us, and we thought that we knew what love was and we thought that we had found it. We were wrong, well at least I was. He led me on and told me that he loved me, but in reality he was flirting with other girls and hooking up with them. At this point we had not actually met in person, but we talked on the phone a lot, and were always texting whenever we had a chance. One day, months after we finally did meet, everything changed. He told me that I was a pathetic girl who did not deserve to live, and that I had no friends. He told me that he was never my friend, and that he never really loved me. I was heartbroken; it was so terrible and devastating to me, because I believed every single word that he said, and I hid myself from the world for a while. I did not talk to anyone, and I tried to figure out what I had done wrong.

Months later, after I had finally started to realize that I did not do anything wrong, and that he was just a jerk who I wasted my time on, I ran into him at the mall with Kaitlin. He hugged me like we were the best of friends, and as if nothing had gone wrong between us. I was very angry at the least, but I was also a bit shocked, It did not help that butterflies had appeared at just the sound of his voice. But then he started flirting with Kaitlin, and I could not help but to feel as if I wanted to punch her for talking to him. I had never felt that way before until then, but when the feelings struck, the struck hard.

I stormed off, trying not to burst into tears. I had never told Kaitlin about him before. I headed into the nearest store and hid in the back where no one would see my crying. I was so embarrassed that he would do that to me, but then again Kaitlin is much prettier than I am, so it is not like it should be a surprise to me. She was everything that any guy wanted. She was tall, skinny, blonde, and beautiful. She also has the bluest eyes anyone has ever seen, and her teeth are perfectly aligned. I get jealous of her every time I take a look at her, because she always looks so perfect without even trying, and I look horrible no matter what I try to do to change that.

Weeks later I came to find out that him and Kaitlin had begun dating, and it was heart wrenching, but what was I to say? I was not going to be a bad friend and tell her who she can and cannot date, it did not help that she was falling hard for him too. I just distanced myself from her for a while, and he ended up breaking up with her, because he thought that she cheated on him. At that point he began talking to me again, when he was with Kaitlin. He always asked me questions about her, and the little things that she liked. He treated me as if we were best friends and we did not even have a past.

The boy ended up breaking my heart plenty more times, but I finally got over him. We pretend we don't even know each other, don't even acknowledge that one another is another human being. I was strong enough to do that, and put my foot down. However, I think that, in a way, I am repeating the same thing over with Alex rather than with Brandon. I really do not want that to be the case, so I should probably try and stop it now before it becomes what had happened in the past. I don't want our friendship to end up the same way.