This is my first time being in love. I don’t see it as gay love or a love that no one can understand; I simply see it as love. This guy, I want to be around him, I want to talk to him, look at him, and spend every waking moment with him. All my life, which hasn’t been that long, I’ve been detached from the world. For seven years of my life I was depressed, I sought no help, I confided in no one, and I isolated myself. My depression was not due to me being gay, no, no… looking back on it I always knew I was gay, my eyes would wonder to a certain part of the men in the locker room of my dad’s health club. Anyway, my depression caused me not to trust, not to feel, and now that I’m out of my depression I have to adjust to the real world. If someone was ever away, like a friend, or a family member, I would never miss them. I never thought about them. To this day there are few people that evoke that kind of response. He does, my love does. Twenty minutes after our first date, I missed him. I missed his smile, his eyes, his everything. If I was smiling it was probably because I was thinking of him.

I was never able to sympathize with those lovers I see walking down the street. Now I can, now I can say I have that, I love. As much time as I’d like to spend with him I cannot. We are able only to see each other on the weekends, and not for very long. I started to feel a pain. A pain I could not find the source of, something I have never felt before. I suppose, and as cliché as it may be, it could only be described as an emptiness. I asked myself, “What the hell was wrong with me?”, “I don’t feel, I don’t love”. But he, he changed that.

It was months before I wanted to tell him that I loved him, and it was a nice summer day. We were at the national arboretum, sitting near the pillars. I needed to say it, I needed to tell him! Harder than coming out, harder than anything I’ve ever faced, I had to say I love you. So I did, I took a pause, sighed, “I………I love you”, with all of my heart I said it. He looked at me and I could see it, I could feel that he loved me too. And when I heard him say “I love you”, it felt unbelievable. I use those words “I love you” every day, when my mom or dad ends a conversation, they always say I love you. As a natural response I say it back. While it is true, saying I love you to him was, it was indescribable.

The reason I’m sharing this story is because our 1-year anniversary is coming up, I want him to see this, and I want us to understand what we have together. I want us to understand, because we will be going off to college soon. I want us to examine what we should do. I’ve never met anyone like him, I’m sure I never will again, in fact I don’t want to meet anyone else. I want to be with him. I know that if we are meant to be then no amount of land or water between us will stop us. People say to me that everything has its time and everything must come to an end, but not us, not us. We are eternity.

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