Waiting for Everest

Introduction

Dear Reader,

I guess this is a disclaimer. While I've always been sort of obsessed with romance as a genre (I'll admit, I cried like a baby at the end of The Notebook), I don't actually know much about love. And that's because I've never been in love.

Don't get me wrong, I've had plenty of crushes, celebrity and otherwise, and I've definitely talked myself into thinking I'm in love with some boy from my Spanish class who gave me the answer to number five in the workbook that one time. But it hasn't been love. Not that cinematic, kiss-me-in-the-rain love, and not even that more realistic, feed-me-soup-when-I'm-sick love. Nobody ever seems to talk about that awkward, adolescence phase of maybe-love you go through before you figure out your first real love. And nobody ever talks about how easy it is to get so worked up about a boy that you start thinking the planets revolve around him (or, at least, your daily habits start revolving around him on a severely stalker-ish level).

I think I've finally figured out my first love. Of course, I'm only nineteen, so I could be way off the mark here. But after about eight years of convincing myself I was in love with this boy (on a stalker-ish level, I'll admit), I figured it out. And since I'm not the type of girl to spoil a story for you, I'll let you go ahead and read this novella. Maybe you'll figure out what my epiphany was.

And for those of you who need a little more help figuring out what first love means to you, turn to the master of romance: Nicholas Sparks. His novel The Best of Me is about to hit the big screen on October 17th, which means you can eat popcorn and sob over the romance of two fictional people in the sanctity of a dark movie theater really soon. But while you wait, here's my clumsy attempt at explaining what first love means to me.

Cheers,

Kate