Love hurts. Simply stated. Had the person that said that ever been in love? I mean, if they had, wouldn't they have said love kills, love scares, love causes uncontrollable hatred. Though only once have I really been in love. If you want to call it love, I thought it was, but does love end so quickly, so blindly that I couldn't see its devastation and end? Simply stated, have you ever been in love? If so, can you define it, can you tell me what it is exactly that makes a being do such involuntary things, cause others so much desperation for their own happiness. What I once shared with someone, I don't know if that was love, but I would oh so like to think that it was. Every waking moment I spent thinking of him, of making a life with him. Was that foolish, a childish thing to ponder? How could it have not been childish when I was yet a child of 17 myself? Perhaps I should start this tale from the timeless beginning. It all started the year that I was a senior in high school. I wasn't exactly what you would call prom queen material. I was alone, in my own self-inflicted world. That's where I wanted to be, I didn't want to be known, I wanted people to forget me as easily as I would forget their fake beings. I was always treated kindly by those who didn't accept me, they never outcast me or acted superior, but they knew that they belonged and I didn't. I knew that too. I would see them with their cliches, I would see them laugh and joke, couples walking the hall hand in hand, groups of friends, but I was never in one of those groups. I was always alone, walking the hall thinking to myself. Yet they always seemed content with their way of life, like they had it made. I always felt sorry for them, I felt sorry for those girls who were only accepted because they had had sex, by the guys who treated others poorly to gain respect. I felt sorry for them because they had to change who they ARE to be accepted by a faceless group of fake individuals. Perhaps they felt sorry for me, because I never had a friend to walk around with, never had a group to call my own. But I knew that my life wouldn't always be that way, I always wondered when they were going to realize that their lives weren't always going to be the way that they were at that moment in time. When were they going to wake up and become who they were on the inside, when were they going to become real and true? But enough about them, they don't play that large of a part in my tale, only one of them even has a part. His name isn't that important, what is a name, what is important is that he was special. He was like them, alone in the world, and yet part of it. I never understood why he stayed that way for so long, why he covered the real him by lies and falsities. And yet he stood apart from them. Unlike the rest of my class, he wasn't fake completely to the core. He had an ounce of the real him still in there somewhere, he just needed me to show him that could make himself renewed. He had to gone to the same school as me ever since Kindergarten, but yet I had never noticed him, and I am quite sure that he never noticed me either, or at least I was until that year. The year I feel in love with him. Maybe life would have been different, even better, for me if he had never noticed me, if I had never noticed him. But we did find each other, and in a way, I am happy that we did. You see, he showed me that love is something that you have to prove, it is a gift that you are only given once and you should spend that one gift on someone who is worth it. He gave his one chance at love to me, and I gave him mine. I remember how lonely I was until the day that I met him, how from the first "hello" we shared, I was complete. I fell in love with him so quickly, I felt like there was no one else in the entire universe and I thought that what I felt was real. We dated for some time, fell in love and eventually decided that friendship was the path we were chosen to walk together. He helped me as to love myself, to accept that I am different and because I know that, I DO fit in. I helped him as to realize that he is someone, that he doesn't have to be who "they" want him to be. That the real him, the one inside, is all that matters and that he should be that person, because the one on the outside would eventually kill what little control he had over who he was. I will never forget him, and I will never love again, not in the same way, not with so much devotion and dependence. Every one says that teenagers don't know what love is, or when they are really feeling it, but I know that what we had was love, I know that what we had was real, well almost. I just wish that what we had had lasted and that we hadn't turned into a statistic.