Just Believe

When you are young, you always hear of summer romances, young love blossoming in teen hearts. You lay in bed at night itching to be older. You watch your older siblings fall in love, get their hearts broken and the entire time you sit and wonder, “When is it going to be my turn? When will I find that boy whose laugh makes me smile, whose touch gives me butterflies?” You slowly grow up and you have that perfect boy on the outskirts of your mind. Everyone tells you, just wait he will come along. You will be swept off your feet and you will be head over heels in love. Yet, slowly but surely, some people lose their belief in love; they do not believe in it because they have been too hurt or simply because they have never witnessed it.

Growing up, I never believed in love; I was always one of the boys. When I fell for boys, they were players, and when guys liked me, I never gave them a chance. I was never shown a loving relationship, my parents were rarely together and most all of my friend’s parents had separated.

I stopped believing in love the day my sister came home crying. Her boyfriend of three years had cheated on her. She had planned her entire life around him; instead of going to Boston University as she wanted to, he convinced her to go to Arizona State with him. She was devastated the day she walked into his dorm room and saw him in bed with another girl.

She looked me straight in the eye and told me never to trust a man, and I listened. She moved back home, got a job at the local mall and stayed in her room whenever she was home. She forgot about all of her friends and one day I came downstairs to find a note saying she was leaving to move to Boston because home reminded her too much of the past.

I hear from her often, and she seems happy, but the memory of her pain still haunts me. Ever since I saw her change due to one guy, I stopped believing in love. It was the easiest thing I have done in my life. That is, until I met John Cornelius O’Callaghan.

You don’t know when your life is going to change; it’s not as if you wake up one morning and look at your ceiling thinking, hey, I’m going to meet a boy today and he’s going to change my life completely. Life doesn’t work like that; it doesn’t come with an instruction manual or a playbook. It is full of surprises, drama, humor, hurt, love, lust and hate. It takes you for a ride, and takes you places you’ve never been before, and sometimes it takes you places you never want to see again. My life gave me John, and even though I thought at the time he was no good, he was the best thing I could have gotten in life. He taught me to stop worrying, and to just believe. He taught me to live.