Five Years
Disclaimer: I do not own any part of Degrassi and make no profit from the following story.
Prologue
Five years…it doesn't sound like a long stretch of time until it's broken down. Five years is a total of sixty months. Five years is filled with eighteen hundred twenty-five days and contains forty-three thousand eight hundred hours. Times the amount of hours by sixty and the total of minutes is over two point five million. It's amazing that something as simple as five years can get so complicated with a little multiplication.
I like to think of five years as the amount of time that it took for my life to shift a hundred and eighty degrees on its axis. I was the man of few words, the partier and the guy who slept with a long line of women but never more than a handful of times. I was the guy who hated the world because my dreams never turned out quite like I wanted and I had found myself immersed a job that I viewed was going nowhere. I lived for a good time and I never gave a damn about the consequences. If I screwed up a promotion or hurt some girl that I couldn't remember the name of after I had my fun, it was fine because that was just the story of my life.
That was until she waltzed back into my life.
I had known her in high school and at the time, what she knew of me was less than good. I was the bully, the guy who tormented her and her friends for not fitting into the status quo. I was the guy who had the tendency to take the fact that my brother wasn't what I wanted him to be out on the rest of the world, causing the world to view me as a homophobic asshole. I was, in short, everything she was against and everything she hated all rolled up into one package.
She, on the other hand, was no less than a saint. She accepting everyone for who they were no matter if they met her expectations or what she believed should fit into a specific mold. She was never without a smile for a stranger, a kind word for an acquaintance or a hug for a friend who needed it. She was all that my teenage boy desired off and on and completely out of my league in every which way. And my knowledge of this made me act in ways that I regret now.
However, the different paths that we were on drew my focus away from her and I guess that I began to forget she existed. There were times when I would see her in the hallways and my old self would briefly resurface, times when I would have to remember that I had changed my image from idiotic bully to well-rounded jock. She would be laughing with friends or digging through her lock and I would have to bite my lip to keep the sarcastic comment from escaping. But those times were few and far between and soon, she became just a memory that skirted around the edges of my mind.
After graduation, I rarely ever heard about the girl and I doubt she ever heard about me or desired knowing anything about me. In fact, all I knew about her time after Degrassi was that she had turned down the proposal received at her graduation and had gone on to be as much an academic star at her university that she had been in high school.
Although I would hear various things about her through the grapevine that was our shared friends, I had not seen her since we departed ways after high school ended. Until, that is, eight years later when she moved into the apartment across from mine.
We didn't immediately hit it off like a couple would in any romance novel. We still had those misconceptions about each other that we had had when we were in school. She still believed me to be a barbaric jerk that was small-minded and I still believed her to be a goody-two-shoes prude who was more saint than sinner. Getting to know each other was slow going and never in my life did I think that I would think that I would be standing where I was in only five short years.
Our relationship was never perfect. Old anger and past hurt got in the way more times than I can count. But we always seemed to make it work some way. We had passion, we had understanding and we had a connection that neither of us could have formed when we first me. We had bonded in a way that I could no longer see my life without her and vice versa.
When I look back on the five years it took to get where we are now, it all appears as one big blur. However, within that blur is a story that I believe worth sharing. It is a story that to be able to tell will need to be broken down by days to fully encompass every tumultuous and thrilling moment that we've shared. And I'll begin with day one.
To Be Continued…