the ghost of christmas past

i can't believe it's been two years. he is now little more than a memory, but i find reminders of the past in the strangest places. on the fire hose outside the ladies' room of my office building. along the street i pass on my way home. the bakeshop-deli me and my workmates frequent.

it was around this time two years ago that i fell in love with him. at least, i thought i did. looking back, i'm not quite sure if i did fall in love. or if i was simply finding a way to ease the loneliness.

logically, there was no reason for me to love him. no reason for me to be attracted. he was not tall, dark, and handsome. not by a mile. his sense of humor is cheezy. he has a nasal voice that no girl would ever swoon at. he wasn't exceptionally smart. and he was far from witty. but still i loved him.

i hated it whenever people asked me why i love him. because i could never find a satisfactory answer. whatever i said wouldn't be valid enough reason for the amount of emotion i felt for him.

not good enough. because he's the wrong skin color. he isn't from the right socio-economic class. he doesn't have the proper family background. all of which generally goes against the idea of me loving him.

maybe i have this warped belief that i couldn't do better. that i don't deserve anything more. better and more being the standards defined by my family. richer, smarter, funnier, more cultured, more refined... everything he isn't.

then less than a year later i fell out of love. the funny thing was we never got to really say goodbye. we just drifted away from each other. when we met up over a year ago, he tried to kiss me and i pushed him away. not because i knew it was wrong. but simply because i didn't want him to kiss me. i didn't want to kiss him. the magic was gone. and that was that.

the next time i saw him was probably six months later. he didn't change much. but he wasn't the same. he became just another guy. someone i used to love. a shadow from my tumultuous past.