Im going to write my life story now, from the moment I started living. I don’t mean seventeen years ago when I was born, I mean when I really started living. 2 years, 6 weeks, and 4 days ago, I fell in love. That was when I started living. I thought I had been in love before then, to a girl I had dated for almost 2 years, but as time went on with pixie I realised that the kind of love I had had for that girl barely touched the corners of what I felt for this one. It wasn’t love at all. The way we met was strange, not a typical cliché meeting where it’s love at first sight or an instant connection, but instead we worked for the love we have. We spoke about our lives, and how different they were, about what we spent our days doing, and how we spent our weekends apart. We spoke about our music tastes, both a little out of the norm but almost matching and creative, about our hobbies and our routines. Everything she had to say, I listened to with only the slightest awareness of everything else around me. Once pixie had my attention, only she had it. She was a simple girl you see. She came from a small place up north, where everyone knows everyone and there’s nothing to do but entertain yourself. I’d grown up around arcades and bowling alley’s, around busy streets and the roar of car engines, with my family intact and my lifestyle neat and busy. It ran like clockwork, jam packed but all the cogs moved. I had music lessons and the contradiction of stealing cars and graffiti’ing on the back of church’s for my hobbies. She on the other hand, explored how the mud sprayed up your back when you rode across the landscape on a quad bike and spent two nights a week with her dad. Often I’d forget what I had to do until the time came to leave her. Back then I had a curfew as we liked to call it. I’d never heard her name before, not pixie but, her real name, that you’ll come to learn. I’ve heard it maybe twice since, referring to other people, and it makes me flinch inside every time. I don’t like her name on others, there will never be anybody that fits it as beautifully as she does. As time went by, we grew closer and closer, and we used to dread the days when she was at her dads or, the weekend took us away from each other. It grew more and more intolerable to be away from her. Like she was my air. We had the silliest conversation’s really, and we made our screen names out of song lyrics. I wrote her poems and she used to doodle. She has an artistic hand. Never seen fingers like hers. The first time the summer holidays came and I had to go away, it was close to unbearable. We said goodbye at least 10 times before one of us left. If you could wrap a wrench around your heart and tug it, then you would know the sheer, sharp sensation that I had. I didn’t know I was falling in love with her, I wouldn’t know for a very long time. We used to say “I love you” to each other, but the words never carried as much meaning as they do now. They grow stronger, more meaningful with each passing day. I spent two weeks away from her that summer, two long, tiring weeks. She told her dad she was missing somebody, I remember her telling me. And he told her to cheer up, they’d be back soon. When I came home for my GCSE results towards the end of the two weeks, her excitement was so strong it cut the air into a thousand smiles when it collided with mine. Everybody in the catchment on 100 kilometres would have been buzzing that night. It was like fireworks. The day I came back to her, was the day I realised I’d fallen for this girl. She’d come into my world hard and fast, and I’d fallen for her at twice the speed and strength. She went camping that summer, down the bottom of her garden with somebody she told me was her sister. That just about sums her up, her lifestyle. I never thought of camping at the bottom of a garden before. You find pixies at the bottom of the garden. Those three, four days seemed endless once I knew that I loved her, and since then, each moment I’ve spent apart from her seems like a wasted one. Many of you would think im exaggerating, but do not feel you have the right to judge unless you have your own pixie. It got to the stage, as time went on, where we both became ‘atattched’ to other people. I won’t stray too far onto this subject because it pains me to talk about it, but we did. The relationships, for whatever reason, didn’t last long, and it was after them that we realised there would never be another of each other that could make us feel the way we did when we were together. Although It strengthened our desire to be together, take note of this part of the story. It’s where the jealousy starts. We carried on. Loving, fooling, living, breathing with each other. And one day, when the big arguments started, we fell out. She ignored me, for day’s, and now im not afraid to admit that that was the first time I’d felt heartache. I pleaded with her to reply to me, talk to me. I pined after her and dreamt of her. For her own reasons, she did what she had to. It was my seventeenth birthday, and I spent it without her. It was to date, the worst birthday of my life. During that time, I spent a night talking to somebody else. Things went regrettably too far there. I wanted somebody to replace pixie, and so I bled my heart out to this girl about how much I missed her, and received comfort in return. I never knew she was coming back. I make no excuses for what I did there. I should have known better than to ever think somebody could replace pixie. There will never be anybody like her. I was wrong, also. She did come back. The relief I felt when she did, I can feel in my bones even today. It’s the kind you get when you take a big sigh in the crisp cold air, and watch it blow out before your face when you exhale. It fills your lungs with the refreshing chill of oxygen and restarts your heart ready for the next breath. Since that time, I have never let her get as close to ignoring me forever as she did then. I kept the occurrences during that time a secret for a while. But something we have both learnt in our relationship, again recently, is that there is only so long you can keep secrets from the ones you love. Or more to the point, the ones that love you. Not long ago now, I went to visit her hometown, and it was beautiful. I have never seen such serenity in my short life, and am yet to find something, other than her, that takes my breath away so easily. Myself and pixie have made steady progress over these 2 years. We’ve pleaded, shouted, hated, bitched, laughed with each other. We’ve proven everybody wrong that thought we would never last. You will never find a relationship that has been more difficult than ours and yet, we made it. Even with our backs against the walls. 262 miles, could not keep me from loving this girl. I changed the path of my future to be with this girl, because I love her so terribly. She’s broken my heart, and now owns all the little pieces inside a gold heart on a chain that she wears around her wrist. She has me on a rope, im telling you. She helped me through my parents divorce, and sickness. Through self harming, and im not afraid to admit that either. This girl has helped me through half the marriage vows already. This is the girl, that I hoped I was going to marry. But we never really know what’s around the corner. I’d like to have children with his girl. To be her first. But its all easy to say. Im only seventeen. I know nothing about the ways of the world or what women want. But I can say this. I know what jealousy is. I know what being selfish is. I’ve undoubtedly been more selfish to this girl, denying her the smallest of things than I can put down in words. I know what breathlessness, and lust on another scale is. I know what its like to live. This girl I describe as my Bella, because there is nothing more tempting, more desired, more precious to me than her. I will love her forever, and there’s nothing I can do to change that, no matter how hard I try.
This girl is called Evie Simpson. And you will never be like her.
