Fickleness Plucking at my Heartstrings

I'm always the first to admit that I don't have a social life, especially right now. Yes I have friends, but mostly they are co-workers, and I usually only see them at work or in the hallways if we live in the same building. I don't actively try to spend time with most of my friends, and now that I'm on a night schedule I spend the majority of my time holed up in my room.

I'm kind of stuck in the middle of being an introvert and an extrovert. So even as I enjoy hanging out with friends and doing things with them, it usually leaves me drained afterwards and then I don't do anything for weeks. It hasn't always been like this, of course. Growing up I was always surrounded by younger brothers that I played with, and in high school I always had friends that I spent time with. It only really started when I moved with my family from Utah to a small town in Iowa a few years after high school.

Since there was nothing to do, no where to go, and no one to meet, in Iowa I got into some very bad, hermit-like habits. And these habits continued through my year and a half in California studying Korean, and now again here in S. Korea. So far, there has only been one person who has really brought me out of my hermit-state, who I met while I was in Texas for some training.

My first boyfriend.

It's still a little embarrassing to say I didn't have a boyfriend until I was nearly twenty-three, but it's true. This is partially due to the locations I've been in, but it's mostly due to my shyness, which I still have trouble with today. But when it came to Jesse, that shyness didn't even matter.

We were in the same class, even though he was a Spanish linguist and I was a Korean linguist. The first week or two I knew him by sight, like I did with the rest of my classmates, but it wasn't until he switched chairs to sit next to me that I saw more of him.

The class I was in was extremely boring. It wasn't the content, no, that was interest. Rather, it was the amount of time we spend doing nothing. It was a month long class, if I remember correctly, but the amount of things we had to learn and could have been done in less than two weeks. And so we spent a lot of time watching movies and chatting and just fooling around. So to pass the time I worked on a story idea I'd had in California that I never did anything with.

And when I struggled with naming things, I turned to my next door neighbors and asked them things like 'what was your grandmother's maiden name, what street did you live on growing up,' etc. And Jesse, who was sitting on my right, got curious as to what I was doing with this information. So I let him read some of what I was writing, because I'm an insecure writer and like it when people read my stuff and tell me it's good.

And he liked it. He liked my story enough to encourage me to write more, and so I wrote a lot during that class, giving him the different parts as I wrote them. Then the class was over and we both moved to our language specific classes.

I didn't really think much about him after that. But then, a few weeks later, when I was invited to go to the arcade at the local mall with some other friends, he was there. We got talking, and I started joining this group of friends more often and seeing him more often. We ended up eating lunch together a lot, even though we were both on different schedules, and after study hall we would get together again for dinner on the weekends.

Then there was the movie watching. Whenever we could, we would hijack the building day-room, where the TV was, and we would watch a movie. We watched Kiki's Delivery Service -- one of my favorites -- and The Thieves -- a great Korean heist movie -- among others. And then we went to various restaurants around town for dinners. Then we started spending weekend evenings and nights at the Hastings bookstore, which people said was a weird place to have dates, but we both loved books and movies and it was really the only place open late other than bars.

And then I realized somewhere among all this time spent with him that I liked him. And not just puppy love, but I enjoyed being with him. We always had stuff to talk about, and he was always making me laugh, and I was surprisingly good at making him laugh as well. And he was always encouraging me to write.

We both knew it couldn't go on forever, though, because he was going to graduate his class and leave for another part of Texas, and I was going to graduate and leave for Korea. But up until the very end, we didn't talk about it, and I tried not to think about it.

Then he left, and I cried. I was heartbroken that he was now gone, and I missed him like crazy, even moments after he had left me at my dorm room on the night before he left. The next couple of days were hard, because everything reminded me that he wasn't there anymore. I ate lunch alone, and I spent more time in my room then ever before.

And then, three days after he left the strangest thing happened. All the feelings I had for him disappeared, vanished like they had never been.

Before he left we had promised to stay in touch and try the long distance relationship thing. But after the feelings were gone, I didn't want to think about him anymore, and just the idea of keeping up the relationship when I had no feelings left felt wrong. So I broke it off with him, and since it was my first time doing anything like this, I didn't exactly do it the nicest way. In fact, I'm pretty sure I broke his heart, and it's one of my big regrets to this day.

Skip ahead a bunch of months, and I made it to Korea. And without realizing it, I missed Jesse. I still do to this day, and I really regret what happened in the end. I can't understand what happened. It might have been a previously unknown defense mechanism that I have, it might have been a certain Heavenly Father telling me he and I weren't meant to be. Whatever it was, my first boyfriend, and now my first ex, has become my first big regret.

Sometimes I think about contacting him and apologizing, and trying to explain what happened, but I realize who foolish that would be, and how it would probably just open old wounds for him. So I sit here in my room, missing him and wishing I could have done things differently.

Dear readers, have you had a relationship that you regret how it ended? If you're willing, I would love to hear about how you dealt with it in the comments.

As always, thanks for reading.