I was absolutely in love with this guy for the longest time. Even after we broke up and I had been dating someone else for a couple years, I still thought that he was the perfect guy for me and that we would end up together. Read this essay he wrote about me after we met in a high school debate camp and you’ll see why:

Random Thoughts

By Me

I have a funny way of associating names with personalities and appearances. Joes are tall and bland; Michelles are cheery and energetic, making up for lack of insight with pure volume. Crystals…are strange.

During eighth grade, one of my friends, a typically pretty, sweetly innocent Monica, thought it would be hilarious if she gave me a blow-up girlfriend doll for my birthday. “Name it,” she urged me, leaning on a cracked white pillar of the English building. I just kind of stared at her. “C’mon,” she laughed. I rapidly thought of random names. “Crystal,” I muttered. Whatever. Just make her happy.

Discourse shapes reality, fuels social change and sparks grass-roots movements. Bleiker 2000. That’s the underlying paradigm of this workshop here in beautiful Potland, Oregon, where marijuana plants outnumber people. Words do have a strange power; writers can develop parallel universes, speak volumes, create lives. I’m terrible at that type of stuff. I’m really not that profound. I just try to add my own voice to things, just try to re-tell reality.

When I entered high school, there was a junior named Crystal. She wore about enough makeup to suffocate a dog and had a work ethic that was challenged by eating lunch. But she was nice enough, albeit slightly strange. Crystals must be slightly fucked up, I thought.

High school is funny. So are teenagers. The slightest crisis will put us over the edge; we create our own problems that in turn threaten to swallow us whole. Bloody love. That four letter word that destroys nations and consumes lives, especially those of us high schoolers.

Cynicism- it’s a concept that’s highly overused. I was probably the epitome of teenage cynicism. I guess it comes with being Asian, with hellaciously Asian parents. Happiness, love, blah blah blah. Birthdays? Dude. One of my earliest childhood memories is my mom screaming, “DON’T SAY THAT I CALLED YOU STUPID. YOU’RE SO STUPID. I’D NEVER SAY THAT!!”

One day, one of my friends told me, “One day, you’re going to fall in love and be insanely happy. You’re not truly cynical, you’ve just been taught to be that way.” I nodded at her. I hoped, but I wasn’t so sure.

I hate writing all poetically, with hidden and profound messages. Some masterful writers are able to pull it off beautifully- Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” for example, is simply written but represents so much more. Me, I’m not that complicated or intelligent. I just tell it how it is.

I’m not some brilliant philosopher, some insightful analyzer of teenage thought. After all, I’m just 16 myself. And as hell would have it, I’ve fallen into my own self-marked trap of high school romance and drama. I’ve seen Crystals blossom from weird make-up machines to beauty. I’ve seen cynicism wither away until I can hardly remember that it ever existed.

I’m sure your friends will give me shit if they see this, but whoop-de-fucking-do. I’ve met some ridiculously gorgeous people, some disgustingly intelligent students, some obscenely sweet souls. But I’ve never seen anyone as purely, simply, honestly beautiful as you. I’ve never missed so one so much, never had anyone dominate my thoughts and actions the way my longing for you has. Fuckin’ a. I just need to see you again. At random parts of the day, I’ll play one of your messages that I’ve heard a thousand times just so I can hear your voice.

Crystal Yuan Zheng. I never thought I’d feel this way about anyone.