The summer flew by without a sign of Tao, just as I had expected. Whenever Amber and I went on walks around our neighborhood, she would sometimes mention Tao, and how we always joked about walking from my community to his, simply because it was so close. She’d always say that we had free time before fellowship on Fridays and could pay a visit. We never did.

☁☼☁

Grade 12 passed by without any contact with Tao. As graduation day came creeping closer, all of my friends seemed to fall into a sort of princess complex. Every other conversation was about what dress they picked, and what shoes they could match it with. Every lunch break was for sharing photos of them trying on dresses at bridal stores, or votes on which hair style looked best. Even when grad photos rolled around in January, I still hadn’t thought about what I would wear. Certainly I was convinced to attend banquet with my group of friends, but I wasn’t sure if I was looking forward to it at all.

After the final exams in December, we had a few weeks of our winter break left. For us in senior year, the last week of winter break was for taking grad photos. I didn’t care for them, so while guys showed up in well tailored suits from head to toe, and girls beside me in the waiting line in petite chiffon dresses, I kept to myself. I wore a simple white, frilly skirt with a preppy checkered cardigan over a regular dress blouse. In a way, that was my rebellion against the princess syndrome.

My graduation banquet was simple. None of my friends had dates, so I never felt pressured into having one at all. Only one of my friends wore a corsage, though she too was dateless. I wondered if graduation would have been more memorable if I had one, even if he wasn’t my boyfriend. I’d never get to know. In the end an older friend convinced me that I needed to go all out on a dress, and we settled for a long, puffy pink dress with a ruffled layer of translucent white overtop, the ruffles converging at 3 flowers bunched together by my hip area. It seemed completely unlike me, who cared nothing for dresses or the color pink. I’d worn heels simply because I wouldn’t have to hem my dress, and you could say that the 5 hours of banquet consisted of me consciously focusing on my balance.

High school ended soon after, in a quiet kind of way. When classes stopped, my friends rarely got together or saw each other. Studying happened in solitude. Test writing happened in solitude. And afterwards, we were free. Everyone from my high school seemed to slowly fade out of my life, other than Amber, who I still saw regularly at church.

☁☼☁

My summer was spent readying myself for the big transition into university. I got accepted into the only university I had applied for, just a city away, and though it would be relatively easy to visit my family and friends, I knew that going semesters without them would be difficult. At least in my first year. I spent the most time with Amber. At the summer camp we go to every year, Amber became interested in a guy who was in the “leaders in training” program with us. In my opinion, her life was always much more interesting than mine. If anyone lived a story worth telling, it was Amber.

For the week-end talent show, our leaders group wanted to perform a parody of “One Thing” by One Direction. I didn’t know who suggested the song choice, but everyone thought that it would be easy to make up actions for it. In the days leading up to the talent show we would purposely wake up at inhumane hours to practice in the basement where our music player wouldn’t wake the other campers. Amber was the hardest to get out of bed, but because she had the responsibility to as a leader, she somehow motivated herself to. Not surprisingly, she would still be the last to drag herself to the basement. All of us would be sleepy eyed and dreaming of slipping back into our sleeping bags, but once the music started we would forget our weariness for the next 3 minutes.

In the group of leaders, there was a guy named Henry who had a solo near the beginning. All of the girls would be swarmed in the back, pretending to be love-struck as he did his part to the opening lyrics of “I’ve tried playing it cool/but when I’m looking at you/I can’t ever be brave/’Cause you make my heart race”

Near the end of his solo, Henry has to point to the crowd of girls and then make a heart with his hands. Coincidentally, whenever he pointed, Amber would be standing right in front of him. She noticed it, but it continued to happen. It turned out that he noticed it too, and he was pointing at her on purpose. When she told me about this later on, I felt that it was a cute and subtle way to flirt. My second thought was that she was lucky to have a camp crush, but the chances of camp crushes lasting past camp were slim to none. Besides, how far can you go with a camp crush at a Christian camp that prohibited public displays of affection?

Somehow they made it work. Henry lived outside of Canada and only came back in the summer for a few weeks, partly to attend and help lead this camp. He wouldn’t be permanently in Canada until after high school graduation, so the challenge for Amber was to hold out for a year with the long distance. I knew Amber like the back of my hand, and I felt guilty for suspecting that she wouldn’t be able to do it. She surprised even me.

My first year of university was an absolute blast. I moved into dorms and my roommate was a close friend of mine named Victoria. We were close in Junior High but we were separated when high school came around, though we still hung out regularly. We never talked much about our love lives until we became roommates in first year. When your deep thoughts keep you up at 3am, it’s nice to have someone right next to you ready to let you pour your heart out.

Those 3am thoughts we shared with each other strengthened the underlying friendship we had, and though some of our mutual friends placed bets on when we would have our first fight as roommates, in the end we never had even one.

Sometime in September, Victoria and I were on the topic of dating. Neither of us had ever dated. Both of us agreed that we wish we had known the experience, just to be able to empathize with other people, and just so we’d feel like we weren’t missing out on something in life. We held a very similar philosophy on dating. We wouldn’t date someone simply for “fun”, we would only consider them if we were certain that we wanted to be with them in the long term. Neither of us knew anyone like that. By then, Victoria knew about every single one of my 7 crushes up until then. And I knew every single one of hers, though her list wasn’t as long as mine.

We delved into a deeper question. A question that people have asked for centuries and never really have a certain agreeable answer to. “How do you know you love someone?” “Have you ever loved someone?”

My simple answer is, “I don’t know” and “probably not.”

That night was one of those nights for 3am thoughts. I wanted to know what it felt like to love someone, but in order to know that, I needed to assess whether I had ever loved anyone before. I was certain that answer was an easy “No”. Where would I even get a definition of love?

A clear answer jumped into my head.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸ Love never fails….

 I laid in bed with my blanket covering half my face, staring up at the ceiling where Victoria and I stuck those glow-in-the-dark star decorations, lost in thought as the light from them faded away. I re-read the verse in my head, going through every single crush from the 7^th to the 1^st, trying to see if any of them could fit this definition of love. All of them failed my little test. For most, I could not past the first 3 definitions, because I would always get stuck on envy, and envy ruins many relationships. All of them proved futile, just like I had predicted. Except one—Tao. For a split second I felt scared. What if I actually did love Tao? What if I still do?

In my prayer before bed I asked a single question. “Do I love Tao?”

I woke up the next morning from an unexpected dream. In it was Tao. I disregarded it as pure coincidence and went on with my day. I had more pressing concerns being in university, and my mind couldn’t afford to entertain the idea of love and relationships when midterms were piling in. But the next day, I woke up to a different dream. Still involving Tao. And again, I ignored it and went on with my day, the regular routine of going to class then gluing myself to my desk to study.

On the third day, I woke up to my alarm, ripping me from yet another sweet dream. Involving Tao, for the third time in a row. The first two nights I was reluctant to think anything of it because I suspected that people tend to dream about the last thoughts they have before bed. I hadn’t been thinking about Tao since the first day, especially because my chemistry course was getting a little demanding. There was no reason or prompt to have dreamt about Tao for three nights in a row, and I had never dreamt of the same person even consecutively for two nights before. I took it as an answer to the question I had asked on the first night.

“Do I love Tao?”

Yes. Yes I do.

A/N: Hello Friends! Sorry I haven't updated this fic in a really long time. The reason is because chapter 11 was actually supposed to be the end... But now I'm not really sure where the end is because there's so much to write. I'm sorry if this chapter seems a little rushed but to be honest between the summer of 2011 (in chapter 10) to university (september 2012) nothing happened with Tao at all, so it would be better to just skip the boring parts, right? I wanted to fast forward to the parts that were more relevant to Tao, or exciting side stories with a few of the other minor characters like Amber. 

Also thank you to all the new subscribers! Welcome to this fic and I hope you'll enjoy it until the end (: Remember to like my page on FB to get updates on my "life" as an author and teasers to my upcoming novels. https://www.facebook.com/eslwriting Writing will always be one of my greatest pleasures in life, so writing leisurely like this in a fic is a nice refresher for me. Please share the link with your friends!