But Not With Him

You ever go through the majority of your life being told you’re a certain person, but feeling a different way?

I was always the nice girl. The girl that got good grades and always had a smile. The one that didn’t drink in high school.

I was the friend. The girl that could hang with the guys. The girl that was dumped her sophomore year of high school so her boyfriend could “focus on baseball.” The girl who knew right away that was a load of crock and two weeks later, wouldn’t you know it, that boy had a new girlfriend. I was the girl who laughed about that—the girl who couldn’t be bothered.

The girl who would lend an ear. The girl who boys would talk about their girlfriends with, and when any one of them seemed remotely interested in a female, my first question would be, “Do you actually like her?” Newsflash: The majority of the time the answer was no.

I was the girl that everyone was honest with. I held everyone’s secrets. A living, breathing fly on the wall, not even having to wear the guise of a fly.

If you listen, people talk.

My heart had been smashed being this girl. My reserved, honest, low-key, “cool” self handed all I had into the hands of one of my guy friends.

And as that girl, I just wasn’t enough, because at the end of the day I wasn’t enough for myself yet.

I felt bits of myself that I never even knew shutting down. 

I went through 22 years feeling like this girl. Feeling a little pretty, a little smart, and a little like I knew what I was doing and who I was.

And then I met James. 

And I wasn’t a little of anything anymore.

It was like the moment our eyes locked, I was reawakened to myself. My full self that even I hadn’t tapped into fully at that point in my life. 

I had never had a man look at me the way James looked at me.

It was like everything I had ever felt inside, he saw it.

I wasn’t this reserved, understated girl with a shoulder he wanted to rest his head on.

All at once, I was the woman he desired to know.

He saw the rebel inside me.

The confidence inside me.

The feistiness that had been longing to have a voice. 

The vulnerable, intimate side that no one had ever tapped into.

The deep conversations I had been longing to have, but no one had ever asked.

He saw the rawness and the hurt hiding behind my shield of humor.

He saw all the questions behind my eyes that were always focused on the silver lining.

I was no longer under the radar, but at the center of someone’s world.

And it was intoxicating. 

It was like all of a sudden I had permission to be me. 

I don’t know why I needed it from that particular set of blue eyes, but that’s where it came from.

I had always felt like just another girl,
A face in the crowd,

But not with him.