Guardian Angels

This will be complicated. Part of this story will involve my general opinions, part of it involves my past, and part of it should be coded because it involves a part of my life that I don’t like to openly disclose. Excuse the stardust as we fly all over the timeline as we discuss the past, present, and the imaginary.

Let’s first clearify that being a guardian angel doesn’t mean that you kill yourself and become some invisible angel and fall in love with someone and fall and become a fallen angel a la “City of Angels”. I’m talking about a real life situation where you (male mostly) commit the better half of your life to serve someone you love, but without the knowledge of the other knowing; it’s a one way crush with a materialistic twist, if you want to put it bluntly.

Why the topic? I just feel like it.

I used to believe that being someone’s guardian angel is a very noble idea. I mean, what better way to live your romantic fantasy than to be your lady’s Knight in Shining Armor(TM)? To always be there for that one, to serve and to protect without ever asking for anything in return; perhaps the story might actually turn out the way most story goes and the girl realize that you’re watching over her and loves you back in return.

As you might have guessed, this works terribly in real life. I speak from experience, though a short one. This and other past events had convinced me that I must change the way I look at romantic relationships or I’ll be forever destined to be doomed in hell (not that a change of opinion really changed my fate, actually, but I have more acceptance toward it).

On to the darker side of my history.

Three years ago, when I first started studying in OCC, I met this really pretty girl. She backed up all of my definition of a “perfect partner”: long, straight hair (didn’t expect that one coming, did you? I remember telling someone that “I have no standards.” It doesn’t mean she wasn’t pretty though, obviously.), cute face, lean body, and to top it, an irresistably sweet voice. Yeah, let’s just say that when you hear songs about how some girl was sent from heaven, it was how she felt like to me.

More incredibly, she was the one who found me sleeping (no less, *sigh*) in the library and started talking to me. We shared some rather mundane class together (so mundane I forgot what kind of class it is), and she asked me some questions about that class, and that’s how we technically met. The next day, she dragged me (literally with her hand) to her US History class. It ended up being that she was a transfer student from Hong Kong and so considering that she had no previous knowledge of the subject, college level US History was simply killing her. So, not knowing that sit-ins is as common in college as ditching classes, I took the “risk” to sit in with her, technically going to every lecture with her for the rest of the semester. Hence, the entire “guardian angel” incident began.

So it came to pass that everyday I would spend hours after sitting in her class to explain the lesson to her. I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a pain that she’s really bad at history, so time usually drag on long enough that we’d have lunch and even dinner together before exams. So it came to pass that I’d follow her everywhere, help her out whenever she needs translations or help with homework (and obviously there’s the “let me copy your homework” part, but let’s get back to that later). Her friends know that I’m “with” her and so does my friends, but me still being the devoted Christian that I was, I rejected the idea of “dating” or “premature relationships” and forbid myself to ask her out or do anything that indicated I had any romantic interest toward her. As so it came to pass that a quarter passed and the last exchange we had was just plain “bye”. Nothing added or deleted from that sentence, just “bye”.

Now, this is (at least I think this is) what I would call a guardian angel type of relationship. Actually, life would have been better if the story ended like that. It was inconclusive, but at least my dream wasn’t broken and everyone got a little something at the end of the story.

During the next semester, she and I had entirely different classes and so, without any contact information exchanged, we simply stopped “seeing” each other. One day, I was casually walking around the campus when I saw her walking with another guy. I thought, okay, that’s reasonable, she can have male friends, right?

Maybe a week later I saw her with another guy. And another. And another. And the guys around her keeps changing like weekly fashions, and I get to see most of it since the campus is small enough that we can find each other rather easily.

So one day, I was working alone in the computer lab and she found me again, this time with problems from yet another class. She also introduced me to the guy standing next to her. We exchanged a glance and I immediately know that he was walking in my shoes. He was guarding over her like a bloodhound over a house. So I made and excuse and backed off. Soon after, more dramatic events led me to make other dramatic decisions in my life, but seeing how this post is so ridiculously long that I’d rather save that history lesson for some other time.

I’ve learned my share of lessons about how not to try and predict what a girl is actually thinking, but years of reflection had made me realize that there’s only two possibilities that things had turned out this way, that

1) She had feelings toward me and my reluctance to advance toward her hurt her, resulting in her looking for a bunch of men in direct revenge.
2) She probably was a “player” who solely used men for her own gain; mostly in the form of goods and services.

I would vote for the latter, given my pessimistic nature. Not that I have not had my share of being used by women in the past… ever since I moved to the US there had been people who wanted to copy my math homework every year before college (the joke is on them, I’m not even good at math)… but never had I felt so close to truly “loving” or “being in love” than that experience; believing that you have given everything you can and recieved such cruel fate in return can really break someone in pieces, especially since I really don’t have much to depend on in life than a chance for love.

So it comes to past.

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