You know that feeling you get when you've wanted something to happen for the longest time and then it finally does?
I'm talking heart-skips-a-beat, palms sweating, stomach-in-knots kind of want. That feeling you get when you've resigned yourself to the reality that something will never happen and you've almost begun to accept it, but then something else comes in and changes everything.
Yeah, that feeling. Most people know it.
Well, that's what Hawaii was supposed to be for me.
I, along with ten of my classmates, had been planning and raising money for this trip to Hawaii since our sophomore year of high school. Since then, some of the trip details and attending members had been changed around, but the man goal stayed the same; to have fun – and as much of it as possible. Hawaii was meant to be our first and last post-graduation "hoorah!" to celebrate finally being free of the bleak halls of our high school. A place where we could all make our bad decisions and get them out of our systems before going to college. And for me specifically, Hawaii was meant to be a chance to finally get a taste of what it felt like to be in charge of my own world.
I was meant to come out of this trip a new person – an unattached and content person that wasn't stressed about high school matters anymore. But of course, I've never been that lucky. What was meant to be a freeing and liberating experience for me turned into the exact opposite when I found out who I would be sharing a room with for the next two months. Becoming unattached proved extremely hard when being forced to share a bedroom with someone I was not only inexplicably infatuated with, but a person who also happened to be five months deep into a relationship with my best friend, Riley Park.
And so, circling back to that feeling that most people are familiar with; I'm here to tell you the story of how I don't know that feeling – or at least how I didn't know that feeling. Not until the summer trip to Hawaii where something as small as a twin-sized bed transformed what was meant to be a restful trip to a tropical place into a journey that sent my life spiraling out of control and propelled me right into the arms of none other than the self-proclaimed heartbreaker himself: Ash Moretti.