Someone New

There once was a girl who fell in love with everyone, all the time. She loved to love people, and things, and learning was always her favorite activity. But she learned to hide these feelings from those who would take advantage. For a long time she searched and searched, but there was no one she really loved anymore; everyone seemed to her to be the same. It was like looking for a quarter in the Atlantic Ocean.

Then one day she found him. He was beautiful and sexy and kind and fun, everything she had always dreamed of. She didn't just fall for him, she collapsed over him, in a state that some might call faint or "swooning." He liked her too, she thought, but he wouldn't tell her so, or he would say it in a cryptic way, like, "I like you a lot," whenever she wanted him to say, "I love you."

They spent many months together, but distantly, because they lived so far apart. They saw each other every now and then, but it became too much. And his work became overpowering. They made plans to meet again, to go camping and dance the nights away, but he got too busy and cancelled. When he didn't call for over a week, her feelings began to boil in a fury, and she wanted to know what was going on, and why he'd called her a good person when she needed to know that he liked her.

"Well, we're not dating," he said. And just like that, like the snap of someone's fingers, she knew that he had found someone else. She talked to him for a little while, damming back tears that could fill Lake Powell.

She didn't want to end up like her parents--miserable and alone, or miserable and obsessive. She didn't want to be the girl who jumped like a spider from boy to boy until she was so destroyed that she'd give up all hope. She cried for a long time. But then she remembered that he was a useless boy, and she didn't need him anyhow. She erased his number from her phone, deleted him from her Facebook Friends list, and tried to move on. But always in the back of her mind she was wondering, maybe someday...

And she went on her road trip to meet Someone New. Happily every after?