When the chapter finally closes

Sometimes dreams do come true.

However, your dreams may turn out to be something quite different from what you thought it to be.


As Mark Rosewatter once wrote: "infatuation is an important rite of adolescence". Now, by no means do I claim I am an adolescent as I write this - nor do I claim that how things happened to me is in any way similar to how they happen to most people, but this is a story about an infatuation.

It's been quite a while since I got to the stage where I was "over" the girl in question. That is, the point where I could honestly say I wasn't in love with her any longer. But that was not where it ended, that was not where this chapter closed.
Oh, believe me, I am not talking about a period in which I was lovesick or even thought about her. No that had indeed passed. However, I still saw the girl from time to time and also from time to time there was some tension - or at least there was tension from my point of view, this really doesn't mean it was also there from hers. I knew I was on thin ice. Saying that I carried a torch for her pretty much covered it.

One day, when I was thinking about how this chapter just had not closed yet for me, I realized when it would be closed. It would be closed when the time came that she asked me how I felt about her and I could tell her that some things best remain a mystery (or something less cheesy and obvious in the same vain). It was a stupid thing to think that such a conversation would come to pass - after all, that's just not how conversations work.

Sometimes dreams do come true.

And indeed no such conversation was ever held. Nevertheless, I recently had an encounter with the girl which makes me believe this chapter has finally closed. I saw her as an attractive girl - an attractive girl and no more than that. And we may not have had an explicit conversation about this, but I acted like that as well. And I knew this was no lie.

However, your dreams may turn out to be something quite different from what you thought it to be.

I knew this because inside of me there was absolutely no difference between her and another attractive girl that was there at the moment. It took a while before I realized, but this was the "conversation" I had dreamed about. The chapter had finally closed.
When you are a straight boy and someone else is an attractive girl there is a chance that something happens. I would consider this extremely unlikely to be the way things turn out. But I can have the peace of mind that if the universe pulls a joke on me and that is the way all of this turns out, it will be in a new chapter, not in the closing act of this one; that closing act has passed already.