love and friendship

I was going to try to find some of my old journals to share some of my silly teenage thoughts, but then I got too lazy to look for them. Plus I’m sick. So instead I’m going to share a story from my freshman year in college.

To begin with, I have to introduce E, one of my best friends, who I met that year. Since I was going to a university that was only 20 miles from home, my parents didn’t think it was worth shelling out the money for a dorm room. E was in the same boat – her parents lived even closer to our school.

I first noticed E at my chemistry discussion. She sat in front, a gorgeous girl in a tight red top and long silky black hair, the kind I always longed for. A boy sitting in the back kept cracking jokes and she kept turning around to smile at him. I noticed her, but no way did it ever occur to me that we would become friends.

I saw her again in my English class. I stared at her from afar, admiring her clothes and her confident demeanor. She really was a beautiful girl then, and a beautiful woman today.

Sometime during the 2nd week of school, she approached me after chem lecture. “Hey, aren’t you in my English class?” she asked. After checking to make sure she really was talking to me, I said “yes” and it just took off from there. We clicked instantly, we had tons in common, not least of which she was as boy crazy as I was. We shared our woes of not being able to meet people since we didn’t live on campus, and told each other all our boy stories of the last 10 years. In a very short period, it seemed as if we’d known each other forever. One of our favorite jokes was that we met because she “hit on” me. We would tell guys that and smile at each other flirtatiously and their jaws would drop. Sigh… college girl silliness.

During this time, E was working on campus at the school center. She sometimes talked about a boy that she worked with, let’s call him Sohan, who she thought was cute but unfortunately, he had a girlfriend. One day I went to visit E at work, and she introduced me to him – the most incredible looking Indian boy I’d ever seen. He was tall and lean and had beautiful eyes. He was distantly polite, and didn’t seem too interested in talking to me. I, on the other hand, could not stop staring.

Separately around this time, I had noticed a tall blond boy in my math lecture, who always sat in front and asked a lot of intelligent sounding questions. He had long hair and was good looking in a vague sort of way. I can’t really remember my first impressions of him…only that I thought he was really smart and confident, and not the sort of person that would be friends with me.

In the middle of first quarter, E found out that Sohan and his girlfriend had broken up. She also found out where he lived in the dorms. I happened to know a couple of guys on that same floor, so we spent a lot of time in the next few days visiting them, hoping to “accidentally” bump into Sohan. Finally, it paid off. We were sitting in my friends’ room when Sohan strolled in to say hi. E and I fell all over each other at the sight of him. He said hi to E, and introduced himself to me, forgetting that we had met already. He mentioned he lived on the same floor and we should stop by and say hi sometime. Well heck, that was an open invitation right there! We immediately took him up on it the next day, casually stopping by his room, saying we were visiting our friends and just thought we’d say hi. He was very friendly, and introduced his roommate to us – who happened to be the cute blond guy in my math class. Let’s call him Julien. We chatted, and discovered that we were all in the same chem lecture class.

The next day, E and I were giddy as we went to chem lecture. We spotted Sohan and Julien near the front. They saw us too, and waved for us to join them. I don’t think either E or I paid much attention in class that day. Unfortunately the object of both our affections was Sohan. She didn’t know how I felt, though.

After that, we were obsessed. That’s probably the best word for it. We managed to find out and be wherever Sohan and Julien were. One time after class, we saw them way ahead of us walking away, and we ran like crazy to catch up, stopping a few feet behind them, catching our breath, and then casually calling out to them as if we’d just noticed them in front of us. I really don’t know what the boys thought of us at that time. We tried not to seem TOO obvious, and most boys are clueless, so who knows. They were good friends and were always together, and over the next few weeks, we gradually become a foursome. We went to classes together, ate meals together, and hung out as much as we could.

After listening to me complain about not being able to meet people and having to deal with the traffic, my parents relented and allowed me to move into the dorms during second quarter. E slept over all the time, so much so that when we made T-shirts for our floor, she got one too. We became even closer. Our names were always said together, and there was never one without the other. Some nights, we would sleep in Sohan and Julien’s room – they had a spare mattress on the floor for some reason, and E and I would share it.

Over this period, I was falling more and more for Sohan. I knew E was as well. It caused me some guilt, but not enough for me to stop flirting with him. I kept looking for signs that he felt the same way about me. Then one night when E wasn’t sleeping over, I finally did the unthinkable. I made a move on the guy my best friend was in love with.

I am not proud of that moment at all. I cringe now when I think about it. I was awkward and lame and said stupid things. But the end result was that he admitted that he was attracted to me too. This of course made me feel extremely happy and guilty at the same time. E had no idea how I felt about Sohan. I had carefully kept my obsession from her this whole time. She would fantasize about her and Sohan getting together and say things like, “You and Julien should get together and then we can double date!”

I probably blocked it from my memory, but I really can’t remember how I told E, whether it was a phone call or note or something. She was incredibly mature about the whole thing… she was upset for about a week, and then told me that it wasn’t my fault that Sohan preferred me, and we were friends again. But something between us had definitely changed. Over the next few weeks, there were shifts in our little foursome. I slept in Sohan’s bed most nights, and initially E would sleep on the spare mattress, but gradually she migrated to Julien’s bed. There was a 3rd roommate, who also had a girlfriend, so there was a lot of action going on in that room.

Unfortunately for me, Sohan wasn’t ready for a commitment. His last girlfriend had cheated on him, and he was still raw from that, and not ready to trust anyone again. And, looking back now, I can see that he just didn’t like me enough. I spent the next few months on an emotional roller coaster, listening to cheesy sad love songs and waiting for Sohan to make up his mind. I’d get insanely happy at every smidgen of affection he showed towards me, then crash down again when he pushed me away. I do remember thinking I deserved it, that it was karma biting me for making a move on him when I knew that E liked him.

Finally, towards the end of 3rd quarter, my sense of self-preservation kicked in. I decided that I couldn’t live that way anymore, and called Sohan and told him that I needed to stop hanging out with him. He was upset, and asked how long did I need? I said I didn’t know. He sarcastically told me to “have a nice life” and hung up on me.

We never hung out again. I spent the last few weeks of my first college school year in a haze. I don’t even know how I passed my classes. I read tons of books during that time, to escape. At some point, Julien came to visit me and asked if we were still friends, “or are you not talking to me, too?” It was incredibly sweet and I was touched, but in reality, Julien and I had nothing in common, and although I assured him that yes, we were still friends, we ended up drifting apart as well. He and E stayed together a little longer and then ended up breaking up as well. She eventually lost touch with both Julien and Sohan.

After all this, I made two promises to myself: 1) I would never make a move on a friend’s love interest again, and 2) I would never let a guy take advantage of me again. I’ve never broken either of those promises, although the first one was incredibly difficult to keep a few years later (E and I just have the same taste in men).

I did run into Sohan by accident a couple of years after he told me to have a nice life. He was a year ahead of me in school and it was a few weeks before his graduation. We bumped into each other on campus, and stopped to catch up for a few minutes. It was a little awkward, but we were friendly and hugged each other before parting. That was the last time I saw him. I did find him on Facebook recently, but didn’t add him as a friend. I was gratified, however, to see that he had not aged well.

E and I moved into an apartment together during 2nd year, but as I said, things had changed between us. We didn’t spend a lot of time together, and then we drifted apart too. Then somehow, after we’d been out of college for a year or so, E and I got back in touch. And since we were still boy crazy, we spent our mid-to-late-20s going to clubs and picking up men together (I may talk about our adventures in another post). She was the one that dragged me to the speed dating event where I met AJ. There is no longer anything hanging over our friendship and I consider her one of my best friends. She is still one of the few people that truly understands me.

Well, this was fun. I hadn’t thought about these events in a really long time. Now I am thinking what else can I share with you guys? Hmm….