Here’s How I Knew What I Felt For Him

By

When I first met him and we locked eyes, I knew he was different from everyone else in the room. Nobody else seemed to even exist in that moment.

I had no idea what it meant but I needed to see if I could trust him first, and it took me a few years to get there (I was pretty guarded), but I got there.

I think I knew there was something more (still didn’t know what it was) exactly when his feet smelled (it was bad), and my friend made a face and told him that his feet stunk. He made this self-conscious face while glancing at me for my approval, and I just looked back at him wryly wondering why he was getting insecure, but I still thought he was cute.

I knew exactly what I was feeling when we were on a school bus trip, and he tripped over something on stage, and looked alarmed, but then continued to do what he was doing. And I thought it was cute, and I told my friend, and she asked him if I had feelings for him. On the bus ride back, I glanced at him and he was definitely in the middle of some breakthrough and genuinely glowing with happiness, and that’s when I knew it was a done deal.

That’s exactly when I recognized what the emotion was. It was always more than a friendship. I needed time to process the emotion, because I was not expecting to feel this way about anyone ever. I also hadn’t felt anything inside for a long time and it felt like my insides were dethawing.

It felt like I was ripping off sticky band aids. I pretended to sleep on the bus ride back but I was really internally processing it all.

The ripping off sticky bandaids would continue to be a present emotion for me every time I let him past another layer, and it was a painful process for a few years. But I was trying my best, and in the way I knew how.

Every imperfection he had made me love him even more. As of today, I’ve known how I felt about him for a few years.

This is how I know it’s real.

The laugh he has when he watches his favorite show is the equivalent of a really excited child with a little maniac hiding inside, and it warms my heart.

The voice he has while singing and driving his car is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard, and you can tell his voice is attached to his heart.

The anxiety he gets about many things in life makes him who he is, and I think that’s beautiful. I never thought I would find an anxious guy beautiful, but here we are writing a Thought Catalog article about him.

Fast forward to today and I am realizing those feelings and chemistry will never go away despite us fighting and cutting each other out of our lives a couple of times.

I’ve moved on from him several times in the past few years, mostly because of fears on both sides and because there was someone else in his life. But none of that mattered as long as he was happy.

It didn’t matter until another guy came in my life and woke me up. I definitely was not expecting to meet the new guy when I did, because I was still recovering from losing my grandmother, who was my best friend. The past year had proved to be a tough ride, and I was not looking for anything at that moment. But the new guy had me, and I knew what I had to do to let him in.

That relationship only lasted a mere two months, but it had me questioning if my new guy was going to like the guy I always had feelings for, and it genuinely caused some internal conflict for a few weeks. I was actually literally genuinely confused and couldn’t figure out why. The new guy disappeared without much explanation, but part of me knows the new guy sensed that my heart was somewhere else… and it was. It always was somewhere else.