everyone, meet mr. west (part 1)...

(i'm sorry this ended up being SO long!!!)

so i think i have some explaining to do. or maybe a LOT...

with that, i'd like you all to meet mr. west. we met in undergrad. we officially "met" my junior year (he was a sophomore, but we are the same age - what? i'm a smarty pants, sorry. and yes, it's strange he's my age, lol.) i knew who he was before that. i think most people did. lol. he's hard to miss. he's gorgeous (like kanye west gorgeous - hence the name). smart. driven. but he's cocky and extremely moody. not too mention he is a mama's boy. lol.

like i said, i knew who he was before we actually met but we eventually ended up running with some of the same crowd - his fraternity and my sorority were pretty close. and i happened to be in most of the same classes as his roommate.

i suppose we officially met at one of our fraternity/sorority mixers (ahhh, memories...) but i was seeing someone at the time and he was somewhere in the middle of having very intense drama with his soon to be ex-girlfriend. we both had our fair share of relationship issues during undergrad. i consumed with "the one" and he was going through something very similar with his gf at the time. i guess we "dated" off and on over the course of the next few years. sometimes more than others. we were never a "couple" even though i wanted to be. i was never willing to push him (hell even nudge him) because i knew that he was having a hard time getting over his ex and i understood that. also, i was never really sure of his feelings towards me. he isn't easy to read and he definitely doesn't take sharing his feelings lightly. apparently he felt a lot more towards me than i realized... but i'm only finding that out now.

he intimidates me. and i don't really mean that in a bad way, but he does. being with him wasn't like it was with other guys. i wasn't always "comfortable". basically the opposite of how i felt with the ranger, both good, but very different (and yes... the ranger is one of his fraternity brothers, lol.) does that make sense? i always wanted him to be happy, i was always wondering what he was thinking, i was always hoping that i was good enough for him, i always wanted to make him happy. and i don't mean any of those things in a bad way. i felt those things because of how important he was to me. if i didn't care about him, i wouldn't have worried about it. i would have been "comfortable" doing whatever i wanted and not worrying about if it made him happy or not and i wanted to be the best version of myself not just to make him happy, but because i was happier that way, too.

but i never really let him know how i felt.

we've had a lot of really great times together. some of my favorite memories. both the good ones and the not so good ones.

i think we were both scared of getting hurt again. and our "relationship" was never really defined and i had myself convinced that he didn't feel the same way about me that i felt about him.

fast forward a bit and i graduate college while he is still finishing classes. i end up moving but i still visit him off and on... in the meantime, i was going through a phase trying to get over "the one" and adjust to life outside of the college bubble. if you've ever seen "down with love" you'll understand what i mean when i say that i was "dating like a guy". i told myself that i didn't care if they cared about me because i never left them get close enough to hurt me. if i felt like they were getting attached... i cut them out of my life. and there were plenty of fellas around that appreciated that i didn't want anything from them emotionally. were they using me? sure. but i used them right back. and at the time i thought it was making me happy. i know better now, but you know what? i wouldn't change it. i needed that time in my life. i needed it to better understand who i am now. i needed it to make sense of what was going on with me. i needed it to be able to get the affection that i wasn't getting anywhere else, even if it was trivial. (and yes, i wasn't getting it from my family either... but that's another story).

you can judge me for the things that i've done, or the way i've lived my life but you'll never really understand unless you are me. so go on and make your assumptions, but i don't want to hear it. so save it.

meanwhile, mr. west and i stayed in touch but we might've hit a bit of a rough patch when one of the times i returned to see him i ended up chilling with one of fraternity brothers. WAIT! before you jump to hating on me, understand this: i REALLY had no idea that mr. west felt ANYTHING of ANY significance for me. i was convinced that i was just another girl in his back pocket and if you knew the situation you would probably agree. honestly, i'm not even finding out how he felt about me then (i'm talking over 4 years ago people!) until now, and that took talking to some of our other friends.

well, things worked out after an extremely intense evening of people climbing on roofs, cops being called, and me calling in a tip and driving the get-away blazer... haha, long story. but we still went our separate ways. i was living in a different state and planning my move to grad school and then he up and moved to AZ with a couple of his fraternity brothers...


to be continued...