I Let Myself Want You

1 ● Jesper ● 15.06.2004

June 15th, 2004

Jesper, New York

I don't remember a day when I didn't love Yohan. It seems like I fell for him the second we met, back when we were kids, when we didn't understand life, when we didn't know anything about love. I only remember the days when I was so overflowed with my love for him, that I didn't know what to do with myself. When spending time with him felt so precious I didn't want to go home. When he was looking at me with those deep chocolate eyes so fondly, it made me believe that he felt something for me too. When I had hope for us, for what we could become someday.

Today was one of those days. It was graduation day. Even though we had all of those acceptance letters stuffed deep inside of our desk drawers, we still haven't decided on college, even to this day. There was just so many places to choose from, we couldn't decide. Yale. Harvard. Stanford. Columbia. Hopkins. NYU. Dartmouth. Brown. We were supposed to go to college together, so it was only a matter of time before we could decide on something.

I knew that Yohan was leaning towards Harvard quite strongly, just because his father went there. It didn't matter to me that much to be honest, I would have followed him anywhere. When it came to my choice, I thought about Columbia at first, just so that I could stay in the city, stay close to my mom, but she scolded me for being too sentimental. She wanted me to have the best education possible and she also delicately encouraged me to move out, see the world.

After I had that talk with her, I realized that there was nothing standing in the way of me going to Harvard with Yohan, which made me happy, because I didn't want to part with my best friend. We worked hard through high school to get where we are now, we worked hard to get all of those acceptance letters.

Yohan, just like me, was always interested in science and medicine, that's why we decided early on that we want to become doctors someday. And even though Yohan was a popular kid in high school, who had many friends and many distractions, he always found time to study, because he was determined to go to a good college.

We were best friends since we were four years old, and even though Yohan neglected our friendship a little when high school started – because of his new friends – everything changed between us drastically when he kissed me out of the blue at the beginning of junior year. I was shocked, because I had feelings for him for years and I totally didn't expect something like that. I never dared to confess my feelings for him though, especially not when Yohan proposed that we should become fuck buddies, and certainly not when he got himself a girlfriend in the middle of junior year, while still messing around with me.

I told myself that I didn't have a chance when I first met Samantha. She didn't have any classes with us, so I have no idea how he met her, but she was a true beauty. She was quite tall for a girl and had ridiculously long, chocolate brown hair and deep blue eyes, unlike mine, which were grey, just like me. Not special. I also didn't have gorgeous brown hair, mine was in a weird color of sand. Yohan always laughed that I blend in, when we're at the beach, because my hair was sandy and my skin was as pale as that sand.

Yet I guess I lost quite early on, just because I wasn't born a girl. It didn't matter that we were best friends, that we were sleeping together all the time, that we spend every single day together, I would never be Sam, I would never be important enough to be in a relationship with Yohan, because I wasn't a fucking girl.

I didn't really understand what he was afraid of, because in my opinion, his family was great. I loved spending time with his younger sister Jisoo, and I often took part in the annual Sunday dinners with the Lee family. I guess he may have been a bit pressured by his father sometimes, since Lee Minseok was a doctor himself, that's why Yohan wanted to become one as well. Oddly, it wasn't because his father told him to, it was because Yohan was genuinely interested in that.