Summary : Bella has spent the last year of her life trying to forget Edward Cullen. After all he doesn't even know she exists. Edward has spent the last year trying to forget everything and everyone. Sometimes people are bound together no matter what. AH,OOC

Disclaimer : I don't own 'Twilight'. Sadly.

Chapter One

Bella

I'm a realist, I'm a romantic. I'm indecisive and that's about it. And you dream that's the same thing, that's the same life you lead. I don't agree and so you drink, don't wanna think, that's cos your mind is already made up - The Cribs, I'm a realist

The point at which it all started is debatable. On occasions I tend to compare my life to a particularly nasty train wreck (pessimism is one of my dominant traits I'm afraid). In a train wreck there is always a point at which that train and its passenger's fates are determined. The problem is identifying that specific point, and like most things in life, people disagree over it.

Some people will state that the moment when the train came into contact with the loose piece of track is the point at which the moment of impact became unavoidable. Others will claim that if the train had been travelling at a slightly slower speed then the train would not have spiraled out of control. Therefore the moment when the train driver made the decision to speed up was the point it was all decided. Then a small minority of people will claim that the train and its passenger's fates were determined before the train even pulled out of the station. All those people involved were just innocent pawns in an enormous game of chess that God just happened to be immersed in at the time. I guess that your point of view all depends upon the type of person that you are.

Unfortunately unlike the rest of the general population I do not appear to have a set personality type. I am like a box of paints that an unruly toddler managed to get his hands on and mixed all of the colors until they became an indistinguishable blob of chaos. My friends used to refer to me as quirky when I would do something that would separate me from my peers. My father once called me 'a psychiatrist's worst nightmare' when he was particularly exasperated at me one day. I suppose I can see his point. How can you analyze and repair someone who does not fit any sort of conventional stereotype? Then again you could say, how can you ever fix a broken person at all?

I am romantic yet pragmatic, a dreamer yet pessimistic, talented at emphasizing with people yet hopeless at communicating, terrified of confrontations yet easily irritated and have a tendency to be depressed a lot of the time yet I am naturally hopeful. I am a walking contradiction, a weirdo. Some people spend their entire lives trying to stand out from the crowd and beat the oppression that results from stereotypes. I'm not like those people, all I ever wanted was to fit in and be accepted. Whenever I think about my life all I can hear is 'and isn't it ironic, don't you think? It's like rain on your wedding day, like a free ride when you've already paid...' echoing through my head (that's another thing that you should be aware of. I can take any event in my life, no matter how insignificant, and put a soundtrack to it).

The result of my self imposed identity crisis is that I cannot identify the exact point that my life started to spiral out of control. I don't know exactly when I slipped over the metaphorical line that I was straddling that separated sensible from crazy or sanity from insanity. Much like with the train wreck scenario I often find myself debating where the turning point occurred.

Sometimes I tend to waver towards the idea that it was all decided the moment I was born. Either that or the moment he was born. You see, for reasons unknown I've always believed in love at first sight and soul-mates. I don't know whether it resulted from reading too many romance novels as a pre-teen or whether it was just a quirk in my genetic make-up but it's just the way I've always been.

I don't even really understand why I've always been such a firm and unwavering romantic. I've certainly never seen two people that look as though they belong with each other and would do anything for the other. My mother and father, Charlie and Renee, were certainly not shining examples of true love. In fact I seem to distinctly remember my mother leaving my father for a American man who was twenty years her junior and owned his own chain of gambling shops and moving to Seattle without a backwards glance at her bewildered husband or sixteen year old son and ten year old daughter. I would say that they were more soul destroyers (think the Dementors off 'Harry Potter') than soul mates. Even now my father is 'happily married' to my stepmother (imagine home cooked meals every night of the week and a woman who's soul joy in life seems to be dusting) he still does not exactly resemble the epitome of happiness. Passionate kisses and adoring glances my father and stepmother are not. To be honest I am convinced that the cheese and potato bake that my stepmother is so fond of baking receives more loving glances from my father than his second wife ever has.

You'd think that being surrounded by perfect examples of failing relationships and blatant indifference to marriage vows would cause me to become the type of person that believes love was a concept that was invented so our capitalist society can make money off Valentine's cards. However I've always been the type of person that will not settle for anything other than true love and who refuses to believe that their life will resemble anything other than the plot of a romantic comedy movie.

My theory is that when your entire young life seems to have been a plot to make you lose all faith in the Universe and everyone in it then you find one thing worth holding onto and cling to it like it's your lifeline. I just could not bring myself to accept that one day I'd find myself in a marriage with less passion than a horror film and that I'd represent everything I despised in my father, step-mother and biological mother. I just wanted to believe that they'd been stupid enough to settle for second best and I had seen enough never to repeat their mistakes.

Despite this blazing faith that I possessed I never had unrealistic notions about romance. I didn't depict romance as knights on white horses or bouquets of yellow roses to represent eternal love or any of that unrealistic bullshit. My idea of romance was your heart skipping a beat at the sight of your beloved's face and being unable to get them off your mind all day everyday. I like to think of myself as a logical romantic if such thing exists.

Therefore my romantic side tells me that even if I'd tried to do everything differently my life would still have swiveled out of control at some point and the overall result would still have been the same. At times I find myself wondering if I like to believe this so I absolve myself of the responsibility for all of the idiotic decisions I made in my life. After all it's much easier to look back at a disaster if you know that nothing you could possibly have done would have prevented it. Since I've always been the type of person who would prefer to bury their head in the sand rather than face it head on it is certainly possible that my belief in soul mates is yet another avoidance technique.

Anyway the majority of the time my more practical side over-powers the hopeless romantic inside of me. When this happens I usually come to the conclusion that my life started towards that one way street to chaos and disaster in the November of the year I was fifteen years old.

I cannot remember the exact date that was the catalyst that triggered the chain reaction that happened after that point. I didn't recognize how significant that specific day was in determining the path I would take for the rest of my life until months later. If I'd known how important one simple event can be in the grand scheme of things I'm almost positive that I would have remembered the date and time. However I didn't and at the time it seemed no more important than the average day in the life of Bella Swan.

I have a deplorable habit of over-analysing things that I cannot change and have no control over so naturally I've found myself wondering if I'd have gone into that cinema if I'd known how it would change my whole life and the very essence of the person I'd become. Would I have purchased that fateful ticket (it was possibly more fateful than Charlie's golden ticket in the Wonka Bar) or would I have turned my back and walked away?

The answer isn't simple or straight forward. That day was the trigger for a truck-load of happiness, pain, love, anger, regret and passion. If I was gifted at being rational then perhaps I would come to the conclusion that the whole ordeal just wasn't worth the trauma that ensued. Unfortunately no-one could ever say that being rational is one of my talents.

I suppose the best way for you to be able to decipher my ramblings is to explain the whole story. How do you explain something that caused you more pain and stress than you could have imagined it was possible to feel beforehand but at the same time had the potential to make you happier than you'd ever dared to hope you might be? I guess that the beginning (or like I said previously, what I assume is the beginning) is as good a place as any.

*****

November 2007 - Bella is fifteen

"Bella! Earth to Bella!"

I was abruptly pulled out of my daydream in a rather unpleasant manner. By unpleasant I mean that my best friend, Jessica, was talking far louder than any person can in a public place without attracting unneccesary attention and waving her hand dangerously close to my face.

I'd always had an innate tendency to randomly tune out of conversations. Maybe a lot of people would see this as a fault and at times I admit it does irritate people slightly. However, I always saw it as a kind of gift to be able to escape from mundane reality whenever I want to. From the outside I guess that it could possibly make me look aloof and stand-offish. That may possibly have been one of the factors that it made it so hard for me to connect with people. My friends long ago accepted my general strangeness and for the most part they didn't seem to mind. Others, like my father, saw it as a fault and I suspect at times thought that I phased out to deliberately irritate them.

My step-mother once referred to me as 'living on Planet Bella, with a population of one' (I think it's necessary to state that the sarcasm was practically dripping off her tongue when she said this). I preferred to thinking of it as my happy place.

On Planet Bella best friends did not ramble on for almost an hour about the flavor of the month actor who she was practically drooling at the thought of. On Planet Bella the said best friend would not ignore the fact that I could not care less about 'sexy actor man' and obliviously continue to insist that 'I had never seen a man as gorgeous as this one'. To be honest on Planet Bella I would not certainly not allow myself to be dragged to the cinema on a Friday evening (which of course meant that you could barely move without being blocked off by loved up couples with their tongues shoved down each other's throats) to see an unbelievably hyped up movie just to witness 'sexy actor man's' debut performance.

"What now, Jess?" I sighed as I resisted the urge to shove the embracing couple that were blocking off the queue to the popcorn counter out of my way. Instead I settled for giving them my best exasperated sigh.

"What are you doing? Haven't you been listening to a word I said? There's no time for popcorn, we've got to get good seats," Jess' voice was now bordering on hysterical.

"There is no way that I'm sitting through this film without some kind of food to get me through."

"Well I'm going in. Wait here on your own if you're that bothered," Jess' voice had taken on a distinctly huffy tone.

The implication that if I dared to queue for popcorn I would be treated to first class sulks for the next few days was made extremely evident. I watched as she practically ran in the direction of screen one. I glanced longingly back at the popcorn stand. Then I muttered a curse under my breath and ran to catch up with Jessica.

She smirked at me when I reached her side and lead the way into the screen. We settled into our seats which of course were in the front row (prime seats for ogling Mr Sexy Actor, not so prime seats if you had an aversion to straining your neck) and I watched as Jessica tapped her feet impatiently.

"Will you settle down? We're fifteen minutes early. It's not going to start for ages," one of my pet hates was people fidgeting.

She just rolled her eyes at me in a guesture of good natured tolerance. I loved my friend, but tonight she was being especially annoying. I wondered how this actor could possibly make up for the amount my patience was being tested this evening. I decided that he simply couldn't and entertained myself for the next twenty minutes by rolling my eyes at all of the people around me chattering excitedly about how 'incredible', 'awesome' and 'mint' this film was going to be. Sometimes I really resented the human race.

I had seen enough in my fifteen and a half years to know that anything that could generate the sort of hype that this movie had managed to create was likely to be mind numbing and kill quite a few brain cells. Hype meant that the majority of the population found this film enjoyable. In my experience, at least half the population had less brain cells than goldfish and were fixated with looks. If bimbos and people who based their opinions on outward appearances liked this film then I was positive that I'd hate every moment of it. On various occasions Suki had dubbed me a 'film snob'. I liked to think of it as being selective.

After the same old trailers (BMWs create joy and Ben and Jerry's ice cream brings a smile to your face) the film began. The opening credits came up and I learnt that 'sexy actor man' was in fact called Edward Cullen. Then he appeared on the screen and although I didn't know it then my life changed forever.

I wouldn't say that it was love at first sight. Like I said I am a big believer in stuff like that but this time I don't think that I fell in love with him just like that. It was certainly fascination at first sight but maybe not love.

On the other hand, perhaps it was. I was only fifteen years old and I'd certainly never been in love before. I'd never really felt a strong type of attachment to anybody in my entire life. My mother abandoned me, my father tried to connect with me but we'd just never really managed to form a close bond, my older brother was living it up at the other end of the country and I'd never really been extremely close to anybody else. Sure, I loved my friends but we didn't share everything and I preferred to be alone most of the time.

Therefore, perhaps I did fall for Edward Cullen that very first time I saw him. Perhaps I simply failed to recognize it for what it was at the time. If you've never felt something before then how can you identify it? Love, lust, attraction and fascination are all quite hard to tell apart from one and another when you're fifteen. Until you've lived with those feelings for a while they all sort of blur together.

So I guess the conclusion that I have came to is that it may or may not have been love at first sight (a very vague conclusion I know). At the end of the day it doesn't really matter. The only thing that does matter is that it happened. It all happened in that cinema, the moment he appeared on screen.

I could have conjured up a better location and atmosphere to fall in love or develop a fascination or whatever happened. I certainly wouldn't have chosen it to happen in a jam packed cinema with my best friend practically hyperventilating in excitement at my side and the woman beside me munching on her popcorn with alarming vigor. It was a far cry from the settings of the romance novels that I was so fond of. Yet at the same time it was kind of fitting. From that moment on my life was as far from perfect as it could possibly get but that didn't make it any of it less beautiful. He made that screen in Durham Gala cinema better. That was the thing with Edward, he always made everything better.

He was attractive but not in the conventional type of way. At first glance he appeared to be good looking, but not the type of guy that could make women's jaws drop just by walking past them on the street. Then as I studied his features more closely a realization hit me. I was correct, he wasn't just very good looking, he was fucking beautiful.

Never before I saw him had I ever described a guy as beautiful in my entire existence. I'd seen good looking guys and I'd seen very sexy guys before. I'd seen the type of guy that almost every girl in the room would sell their first born child for. Edward Cullen though, was in a different league altogether.

He had the kind of facial structure that an artist would salivate over. Since that day I have never seen a guy with more prominent cheekbones or such a defined jaw. All of his features were so sharp that it instantly gave him a dangerous edge.

His eyes were emerald green and they seemed to look right through the screen and into the very depths of me. I am not ashamed to say that I may have gasped when I looked into those eyes (okay so maybe I am slightly ashamed).

I felt a peculiar urge to suck on his bottom lip. I wasn't entirely sure whether I should feel worried about those impulses. I mean I had never felt so drawn towards a guy in my entire life. I hadn't ever really felt drawn to a guy before period. Also I'm sure I'd look pretty disturbed if I randomly ran up to the screen and attempted to make out with it. It would more than likely end up with men in white coats carrying me away.

Those aspects of his beauty were just scratches on the surface. I could list a hundred other factors that made him so beautiful. His stubble, his collarbone, his long fingers (pianist fingers, I was a sucker for musicians), his unruly but extraordinarily sexy mop of light brown hair and his legs that seemed to go on for miles all contributed to his gorgeousness. If I'd been at all religious I might have wondered if he was an angel. A fallen angel, obviously.

It took less than five minutes for all of these thoughts to enter my head. Therefore theoretically, I'd came to the conclusion that he was the most beautiful, sexy and attractive guy that I'd ever seen in less than five minutes. I think that in itself is a tribute to his looks.

The rest of the film passed in a blur of smiles that filled my stomach with butterflies and the sexiest accent I had ever heard. To this day I still cannot tell you the plot of the film that I watched. To be honest (and I'm a tad embarrassed by this) the only parts of the movie that I can remember with any clarity at all are the sex scenes (and so began my journey into pervdom).

When the lights came back on to signify the end of the film I just slumped in my seat in some kind of daze. My brain had for some reason turned into mush. I didn't know what type of spell this guy had cast on me but to my horror I was turning into everything I despised about my peers. I was lusting over a celebrity that probably have his own advent calendar by next year.

"Bella? Are you ready to go?" for the second time that evening Jess interrupted my internal musings.

"Um, yer sure," I pulled myself out of my seat and followed her up the aisle.

"Told you he was gorgeous," smugness was Jess' speciality at times like these.

"I never said he was gorgeous," I was not going to admit that she right. Smugness may have been Jess' speciality but stubbornness was one of mine.

"Haha, yer right. You were practically drooling over him."

I resisted the urge to face palm myself. Had I really been that obvious? Clearly subtleness was not one of my talents. I didn't understand why after years of nobody ever being able to decipher my thoughts I would choose this moment to become so obvious. I felt strangely exposed.

"He was cute, but he was not gorgeous," I felt ridiculous uttering those words. Saying that Edward Cullen was cute was like stating Hitler had a few anger issues.

This time it was Jess' turn to roll her eyes as we walked out of the cinema doors. I didn't know it then but my life had changed forever. I walked out of that cinema thinking that Edward Cullen was beautiful. My path in life was chosen for me at that moment. At the time I didn't even know it.

I would never have dreamed that one evening could affect the outcome of your life. I would never have thought that a man I'd never even met would have the power to turn my life upside down. All I knew was that Edward Cullen got under my skin and into my head at some point during that film. From that day on he never really left again.

A/N - This is my first attempt at fanfiction so any reviews or constructive criticism is welcomed.